MIND SPELLER - KU Leuven

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imprint Editorial News Address Campus Insight Communications Office Oude Markt 13 - bus 5005 3000 Leuven Belgium phone +32 16 32 40 13 fax +32 16 32 40 14 campusinsight@kuleuven.be www.kuleuven.be/ci/ Editor-in-chief Reiner Van Hove Contributors Tine Bergen, Ludo Meyvis, Ines Minten, Jaak Poot, Rob Stevens, Katrien Steyaert, Henk Van Nieuwenhove, Benedict Vanclooster Translators English: John Arblaster Chinese: David Xu Design Catapult Layout Wouter Verbeylen Photography Rob Stevens, Michel Vanneuville Circulation 14,000 copies Print Drukkerij Van der Poorten Publisher Pieter Knapen Oude Markt 13 - bus 5005 3000 Leuven Copyright Articles from this edition may be used only with permission of the publisher. Subscription K.U.Leuven alumni may request their free copy by phoning, faxing or mailing (address: see above). If you would like to contribute financially to the alumni association Almuni Lovanienses International, you can transfer your donation to bank account 000-0136526-47 (IBAN BE 22 0000 1365 2647) of Alumni Lovanienses, Naamsestraat 63, 3000 Leuven. If you no longer wish to receive Campus Insight, or if you prefer to exchange your hard copy for the online version, please notify the editor: campusinsight@ kuleuven.be Dear Reader “A poem is a hospitable place you can enter and leave. It can take a snapshot of consciousness and freeze-frame it.” Few people are as eloquent as Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet and Nobel Prize winner who recently visited Leuven. If I had been wearing the mind speller from our cover article when I read the quotation above, it would have said: actually, you could define Campus Insight the same way. We aspire to make this a welcoming magazine that provides a snapshot of the diversity of activities at our university. Of course Seamus Heaney is not the only foreign guest we have received in the past few months. Further on in these pages, for example, you will find a fine group portrait of the varied but like-minded company of rectors and mayors that gathered in Leuven for the 25th anniversary of the Coimbra Group. We also had good reason to celebrate abroad: the launch of the China Alumni Club in Beijing and Shanghai, the first alumni association for a whole country. In honour of this event, I’m very pleased to address our Chinese readers in their own language below. From now on, I plan to hazard a try at a different language in every issue. I will have to look up how to conclude in Finish or Malaysian, but fortunately I already know what to say in English: enjoy reading our magazine and until next time! Professor Bart De Moor Vice Rector for International Policy 亲爱的读者阳春三月 , 我们分别在北京和上海与数十位校友欢聚一堂 , 庆祝鲁汶大学中国校友会的诞生 . 在特点鲜明和家庭团聚般的气氛中 , 校友们畅叙对鲁汶的美好回忆和回国后的心得 . 我们的校友会有效地加强了中国和鲁汶的关系 . 过去几年中 , 我们在这方面已做出了成绩 , 我们和中国最优秀的几所高校建立了新的合作关系 , 今年已有 450 名中国学生在鲁汶就读 . 我们衷心祝愿他们在鲁汶度过难忘的和激情的时光 , 并希望他们在完成学业和研究后能成为我们鲁汶的友好使者 . 通过这本杂志 , 我们高兴地和我们的友好使者们及时分享鲁汶科研和教育信息 , 我祝愿各位阅读愉快 ! 巴特 . 德莫尔教授国际政策副校长 Beauty in smallness “More than anything else, I am fond of the smallness of Leuven,” writes Mesfin Awoke Bekalu, an Ethiopian pre-doctoral student at the Leuven School for Mass Communication Research. “It is not just Leuven’s awesome historic buildings, nor its beautiful gardens, nor its ‘mild’ winter, nor its thirst-quenching Stella Artois, nor any of its other wonderful assets that I have grown extremely fond of over the past few months. It is the beauty of Leuven’s smallness. I first set foot in Leuven towards the end of September 2009. The morning after my arrival, I visited my professor and he asked me what my reactions to Leuven were. The first descriptive word I could utter was that it is little. “Little?” was his critical response with the expectation of further clarification from me. Well, coming from a country where towns and cities usually cover extensive areas of land – though there are no big buildings or standard roads – the first thing that I noticed about Leuven was indeed that it is small.” “For most of us, or at least for me and the culture I am from, small things tend to be more amusing than their big counterparts – kids vs. adults, puppies vs. dogs, cubs vs. lions, and so forth. On the other hand, I often hear people say that Americans love big stuff – big cars, big jets, big tools and so on. I presume that a great deal of psychology and philosophy is related to this issue and would not attempt to formulate any logical reason to support my love of Leuven’s smallness. I would simply say that more than anything else, I am fond of the smallness of Leuven due perhaps to the simple life it has afforded me transportation-wise, the sense of security it has given me, or the feeling of belonging it has rendered me – I don’t know!” Leuven Favourites (© Rob Stevens) Tell us about your favourite aspect – professor, place, culinary specialty… – of Leuven (max. 400 words). The best entry will be published in the next issue and its author will win a beautiful etching of a university location. E-mail your ‘favourite’ to campusinsight@kuleuven.be Prestigious award for Carmeliet His pioneering research on heart and vascular diseases and thrombosis has earned Professor Peter Carmeliet of the Flemish Institute for Biotechnology (VIB) and K.U.Leuven the prestigious Ernst Jung Medical Award, one of the highest European prizes for biomedical research. The award includes a monetary prize of € 150,000, to be used primarily for further scientific research. The Ernst Jung Foundation is bestowing this prize on Peter Carmeliet for his groundbreaking scientific insights into the growth and the role of blood vessels. Carmeliet has demonstrated the importance of various growth factors in the formation of blood vessels (angiogenesis) in cancer and diseases of the eye; and the therapeutic potential of a new angiogenesis-inhibitor (anti-PlGF) for the treatment of cancer is currently being tested in clinical trials conducted by ThromboGenics in collaboration with Roche. Carmeliet’s more recent studies are revealing a major role of one of these factors (VEGF) in ALS, a fatal paralysing disorder of the nervous system. The European Medicines Agency (EMEA) has recognised a Leuven laboratory’s candidate medicine to combat ALS as an ‘orphan medicine’. This name is given to promising medicines that would not reach the market without extra financial and administrative stimuli. Clinical trials to evaluate the therapeutic potential of VEGF for ALS patients are now underway. Breakthrough trachea transplant A team of doctors at K.U.Leuven has successfully performed the first vascularised tracheal allotransplantation. They were able to repair the complex blood supply to the trachea and to prevent the immune system from rejecting the transplant. This operation, which was presented in the leading scientific journal The New England Journal of Medicine, has never been performed successfully anywhere in the world before. The doctors performed a “double” transplantation. They first implanted the donor trachea into the patient’s forearm. The transplant’s blood supply was then gradually taken over by the radial blood vessels of the forearm. Once the blood supply was completely restored, the doctors relined the mucosa of the donor trachea with the patient’s own buccal mucosa. Immunosuppressive medication was administered for the first few months. After the restoration of the blood supply and the partial relining of the mucosa, however, the transplant trachea was sufficiently recognised as ‘self’ by the body. The administration of immunosuppressive medication was stopped completely after eight months and the trachea was transplanted to the neck. The blood vessels that had developed in the forearm were then sutured to the neck vessels. The team has treated three patients successfully to date. 2
News New Centre for Irish Studies inaugurated Nobel Prize Winner Seamus Heaney attends opening Tine Bergen / Katrien Steyaert The new Centre for Irish Studies, which will stimulate multiand interdisciplinary research in three general fields related to Ireland, is housed in the historic Irish College. The Irish College was founded by the Irish Franciscans in 1607. Its primary function was to accommodate Irish Catholic priests and it later also served to house the exiled aristocracy of Ulster. The college is currently home to the Leuven Institute for Ireland in Europe. In 2007, during the celebration of the fourth centenary of the Irish College, the idea of establishing an Irish research centre in the building was proposed. “The objective is to be an incubation centre for multidisciplinary research that will become interdisciplinary in the future,” Professor Hedwig Schwall, General Director of the centre, tells us. The centre will focus on three general fields of research. Irish literature, history and culture/philosophy will of course be its core business. “For example, the Royal Irish Academy has expressed interest in collaborating on a project related to the digitalisation of old Irish texts. Contacts have already been established for the celebration of the Easter Rising in 2016. We are also endeavouring to establish an Irish library that will assemble an important collection in the future.” Peace studies and conflict management is the second field. The context of Northern-Ireland provides many perspectives in this regard, such as school projects about how to deal with a strife-torn society. The third field is economics. “We are especially focusing on international trade and innovation,” Professor Jan Van Hove, Economics Research Director, clarifies. In addition to conducting high-quality multidisciplinary research within the K.U.Leuven Association and in Belgium, the centre is especially keen to stimulate co-operation with Irish universities and research centres. To this end, it will organise workshops and Summer Schools. “For example, in September we will host a PhD seminar for European students who are conducting research into Irish literature, film, music, etc. We have held talks with the president and prime minister of Ireland and they support the project fully. This centre brings far more disciplines together than other centres of Irish studies because its outlook goes beyond traditional Irish research themes,” Professor Van Hove says. The third objective is to support cultural events, through which for example theatre and film will be linked to academic research. “It is our ambition not only to bring together the various research disciplines, but also to intensify co-operation between the various centres of Irish studies on the continent,” Professor Schwall concludes. “For example, a central research institute will be able to organise a European tour of Irish authors, and the increased mobility of specialists that teach at various centres may provide students of Irish Studies across Europe with a better education.” “This is a historic moment” The eminent guests at the inauguration included not only Ireland’s Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin, but also the country’s most famous poet Seamus Heaney, who graced the occasion with his eloquence. Heaney is genuinely honoured to take part in the opening ceremony of the new Leuven Centre for Irish Studies. “I decline a lot of invitations but this is a historic moment. Archaeology Seamus Heaney with a group of Leuven students (© Rob Stevens) The relationship between this college and Ireland is ancient. After the so-called ‘Flight of the Earls’ a number of Gaelic lords, scholars, priests and poets spent the winter of 1607-8 here, while the Franciscans looked after them. For two centuries after that, Irish learning was served here by the exiled intelligentsia. You could draw an analogy with Jews having to flee from Europe to America in the 1930s. The Irish college has become a cultural and educational resource with which some of the most important, ancient documents of Ireland are associated. Leuven is part of our intellectual history.” Heaney has been called the most important Irish poet since Yeats and has been honoured with Whitbread Awards (1987, 1996 and 1999), the David Cohen Prize (2009) and most notably the Nobel Prize in Literature (1995). His modesty is thus all the more remarkable. “Sometimes I seem to forget about the Nobel Prize, while nobody else does”, he smiles. “Of course, I can never forget about it completely. The totally unexpected announcement was as if Zeus had thundered. I fell, had to pick myself up again and walk on.” When we ask Heaney about what has influenced his work, he immediately thinks of his riven home land. “In the last forty or fifty years, there has been a strong poetry tradition in Northern Ireland. People often link that to The Troubles but it is actually intimately related to the talent and the tradition. Nevertheless, during The Troubles, the poets were a kind of principle of civility in a distressful, uncivilised situation. Nowadays, the institutions have changed, it is a different world, but there are still plenty of issues to write about.” He muses on the concept of ‘a good poem’. “It is a hospitable place you can enter and leave. A poem can take a snapshot of consciousness and freeze-frame it, as they say in the language of film. It must have staying power, so that it can survive in time but also keep the world off, for a moment of contemplation or clarification.” Without hesitation, Heaney calls poetry the biggest reward in his life. “It was something magical. I began young at 22 and my first three books came easily. It was only later that I felt I had earned the word ‘poet’, Noble Prize or not. It is a very large word, and still has archaic force. To be named a poet and feel that you have some right to it is the real honour and reward.” Online Read the full interview at http://www.kuleuven.be/ci/ More information at http://www.irishstudies.kuleuven.be/ Egyptology research exhibited in Boston Ines Minten The Egyptology Research Department is an important contributor to the longest-running exhibition in the history of the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston. ‘The Secrets of Tomb 10A: Egypt 2000 BC’ displays the treasures found in the tomb of Djehutynakht, a powerful provincial governor in ancient Egypt. Over four thousand years ago, as he prepared his tomb, he collected everything he thought he would need in the hereafter. In 1915, the American archaeologist George Reisner excavated the grave in Dayr al-Barsha (Middle-Egypt). He discovered beautiful sarcophagi and an extensive collection of grave monuments, which he documented meticulously. Before the archaeologist arrived, however, grave robbers had already found and looted the tomb. “As a result, Reisner found everything in disarray,” Professor Harco Willems says. “Many things had been torn down and smashed.” For years, all these treasures were kept in boxes in the cellars of the MFA. “Boxes full of arms next to boxes full of torsos, ears or legs.” The time and means necessary to open up and restore all the remains had never been made available. Until now. As no MFA archaeologists had been at the site for almost a century, they requested the Egyptology Research Department to co-operate with them in the organisation of the exhibition. Just under a century after Reisner unearthed the tomb, the team from K.U.Leuven followed in his footsteps as precisely as possible. Willems has conducted research at the site in Barsha since 1988 and has worked there for K.U.Leuven since 2002. He and his team are mapping a region that covers a total of forty square kilometres. In preparation for the exhibition, Marleen De Meyer uncovered the tomb completely last year in order to make architectural drawings and a 3D reconstruction of the complex. The team was very surprised to discover that Reisner had missed something. “In a forgotten corner of the shaft, we found the remains of food sacrifices,” De Meyer explains. “They consisted not only of duck bones, which are not uncommon, but also of the bones of cranes. Iconography reveals that the ancient Egyptians fattened cranes in approximately the same way goose liver is produced today, but it is extremely rare to find crane bones at archaeological funerary sites. I’m very pleased that we were able to add these new findings to the exhibition.” An entire space in the exhibition is devoted to the research conducted by K.U.Leuven, complete with photos and video installations. “Of course it is wonderful to see one’s own photographs enlarged and on display at such an illustrious museum,” De Meyer says enthusiastically. “The visitors’ reactions have been unanimously positive. Nearly 175,000 people have already visited the exhibition. We’re very excited that there is so much interest in our research.” (The exhibition has been extended until June 27 by popular demand - ed.) “We were able to provide the MFA with a very good picture of the state the tomb must have been in when Reisner discovered it in 1915. Without our research it would have been extremely difficult to make the reconstruction. We, in our turn, received profound insight into their collection. It is an excellent reciprocal collaboration,” Harco Willems concludes. Online http://www.mfa.org/tomb 3
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