Name Activity "Directorate Research, Library and Internationalisation" "The directorate Research, Library and Internationalisation (OBI) of Hasselt University has a policy preparatory, supporting and executive role within the internal research- and doctoral policy of Hasselt University. In a nutshell, the key words of DOC are:  supporting (preparation and implementation of the research policy), informing and stimulating (about research funding, international cooperation, PhDs), monitoring and managing (of the Special Research Fund, research output)." "Laboratory of Cell Death Research & Therapy (VIB-KU Leuven)" "Patrizia Agostinis" "The Laboratory of Cell Death Research & Therapy researches Defective regulation of cell death, especially in the form of apoptosis, contributes to the development of crucial pathologies including cancer and plays a major role in chemoresistance. Mechanisms regulating cancer cell death also affect the emission of ‘danger signals’ from the stressed/dying cells, which critically define their ‘immunogenic character’ and impact the initiation of immune responses. Our major goal is to understand the molecular mechanisms that control cancer cell death and how different cell death subroutines (e.g. oxidative stress induced apoptosis, ER stress, autophagy-associated cell death) impact immunity and therapeutic outcome. We mainly focus on endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress and autophagy, two key cellular stress pathways with emerging roles in the modulation of cancer metabolism, inflammation and anti-tumor immunity. To generate fundamental knowledge we use several molecular/biochemical approaches that we finally validate by using suitable cancer models.  Our final goal is to contribute to combating cancer by translating the acquired fundamental knowledge into the development of new therapeutic strategies.  CDRT’s specific research topics include:ER-mitochondria cross-talk during ER stress and apoptosisRole of autophagy in carcinogenesis and therapy responseCross-talk between cancer cell death and innate immunityDevelopment of anticancer treatments harnessing immunogenic cancer cell death." "LUCAS - Centre for Care Research and Consultancy" "Anja DeclercqChantal Van Audenhove" "KU Leuven LUCAS, Centre for care research and consultancy LUCAS is an interdisciplinary research centre of KU Leuven, active in the fields of care and welfare. Its mission is threefold: research, trainin g and consultancy. In all three areas, LUCAS brings together insights fr om policy, practice and research, and this in constant dialogue with all stakeholders. Over the past twenty years, LUCAS has specialise d in a number of crucial topics: social trends in care, care for the eld erly, mental healthcare, communication in care relationships, and welfar e, poverty and social exclusion.The key objective of LUCAS is to imp rove quality of life by initiating and supporting innovations in care pr actice and policy. This objective is realized by thorough research that sets national and international standards, as well as by building bridge s between research, policy, and practice. A participative research model enables LUCAS to bring together all stakeholders and to initiate and st imulate collaborations. LUCAS encourages critical reflection, methodical action and a research-orientated mentality in the different care actors . Frequently, research reports and scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals are published. See: (URL:http://www.kuleuven.be/LUCAS) www.kuleuven.be/LUCAS  " "Healthcare & ethics" "Wim PINXTEN" "Research in the broad domain of care and ethics, including bioethics, health policy, medical education, medical ethics, medical psychology, patiënt-driven healthcare, and  patient safety." "Department of Bio-analysis" "Sarah De Saeger" "The department consists of four departments: laboratory of toxicology, laboratory of medical biochemisty and clinical analysis, laboratory of food analysis, pharmaceutical care unit" "Health Psychology" "Andreas von Leupoldt" "Description research unit:Biomedical variables generally explain only a part of a person’s experience of health and illness and in many instances a novel approach including social and psychological influences is needed. The KU Leuven Research Group “Health Psychology” aims at unravelling how psychological and somatic variables interact in health and disease from a psycho-bio-social perspective. Both fundamental and applied research is being conducted ion order to better to understand how interoceptive sensations are processed, and how cognitive, emotional and learning processes contribute to the initiation and maintenance of chronic somatic symptoms, illness and disability. Key words in our group are chronic pain, pain-related fear, breathlessness, respiratory psychophysiology and symptom perception. The prevailing research paradigm is the controlled experiment. Measurements often include self-reports, psychophysiological responses, and behavioural data.Collaborative, interdisciplinary research is performed by a network of experienced researchers, clinicians and students who are fascinated by the behavioural science of health and disease. The ultimate goal is to apply the gathered knowledge in the assessment and early identification of those people at risk, and in the development of customized cognitive-behavioral interventions in the pursuit of prevention and treatment of chronic somatic complaints.The Health Psychology Researcg Group is a dynamic and enthusiastic research group of about 25 researchers from different nationalities. There is collaboration with several clinical settings (University Hospital Leuven, ZOL Genk) and external institutions (e.g. IMEC). We also have collaborations with international labs (France, USA, Australia, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden and Luxemburg) and short visits in those labs are possible as well.Interoception and psychophysiologyLead: Prof. Ilse Van DiestContact information: Ilse.VanDiest@kuleuven.beDescription:Under the supervision of Prof. Ilse Van Diest, several research lines include peripheral psychophysiological measurement techniques, including heart rate variability, beat-to-beat blood pressure recordings, respiration, startle blink or other EMG measures, and skin conductance. Together with a team of pre- and post-doctoral researchers, Prof. Van Diest has several ongoing research lines:Interoceptive fear. We investigate how fear of breathlessness and fear of (visceral) pain change the perceptual sensitivity and response bias towards the perception of breathlessness or pain, respectively. The internee will be familiarized with both psychophysiological and behavioral measures, computational models and will gain expertise in data analyzing, programming and writing of a scientific paper.Vagus nerve stimulation. We investigate the effects of VNS on several behavioral outcomes, including fear, extinction learning, executive functioning, and fatigue. We stimulate the vagus either electrically, either through deep breathing techniques.  We also plan to setup a clinical study to see how vagal nerve stimulation may accelerate treatment effects in patients.Respiration and pain. In collaboration with medical researchers from Leuven and London, we investigate effects and mechanisms of slow deep breathing on pain. Experience and treatment of breathlessnessLead: Prof. Andreas von LeupoldtContact information: Andreas.vonLeupoldt@kuleuven.beDescription:Prof. Andreas von Leupoldt examines the experience, neural processing and treatment of breathlessness. Breathlessness is the threatening cardinal symptom in many respiratory diseases such as asthma and COPD, but also in other clinical conditions such as anxiety and psychosomatic disorders. Recent research from our group has demonstrated that psychosocial aspects play a key role in the subjective experience of breathlessness regardless of underlying lung function. For example, negative emotional states and traits are often associated with greater experience of breathlessness. However, many questions regarding the interplay between breathlessness, its neural processing, its treatment and psychosocial aspects are yet not answered. In addition, similarities and differences of breathlessness with other aversive bodily symptoms (eg, pain) are not well understood. Ongoing studies in healthy individuals as well as in patients with respiratory disease include:Influence of psychosocial factors on effects of a pulmonary rehabilitation program in patients with respiratory diseaseThe neural processing of breathlessness and other bodily symptoms using Evoked Potentials in the EEGThe impact of personality characteristics on the experience of breathlessness and other bodily symptomsThe methods spectrum varies from study to study. Some studies include questionnaire data in combination with clinical patient data as collected in rehabilitation settings (lung function, exercise capacity). Other laboratory studies experimentally evoke mild to moderate states of breathlessness or pain in healthy individuals and measure a few bodily parameters, emotional states and traits and/or neural measures as assessed with EEG-techniques. Pain, action and interferenceLead: Prof. Johan VlaeyenContact information: johannes.vlaeyen@kuleuven.beDescription:Pain is a biologically salient stimulus, mostly of aversive nature, that signals a threat to the integrity of the body, and interrupts ongoing activities. Acute pain usually resolves within hours or days. Chronic pain, per definition, persists for longer periods of time, although it may fluctuate and there can be intermittent pain-free episodes. Pain also interrupts ongoing activities and may compromise prospective memory for the interrupted tasks. Research in our lab has also shown that fear of pain, and the consequent avoidance behavior plays a key role in the transition from an acute pain episode to a chronic pain state, but the exact mechanisms still need to be uncovered. Therefore, we are currently testing the role of associative learning and the acquisition, generalization and extinction of pain-related fear, and the effects of such learning on pain perception, psychophysiological reactivity and avoidance behavior. We also are testing whether the unpredictability of pain modulates its perception. Usually, fear of pain takes place in a social context, and the expression of pain seems influenced by the characteristics of that context. For example, we showed that in a threatening social context, individuals show less painful expression despite increased pain, as compared to a non-threatening social context. Finally, we are examining whether the findings on pain generalise to other perceptual modalities such as tinnitus (ringing in the ears). Ongoing research includes:Painful interruptions and the effects on prospective memory and consequent task performance.Acquisition, generalization and extinction of pain-related avoidance behavior using a 3 degrees-of-freedom robotic arm.The role of pain unpredictability on pain perception and perceptual discrimination of pain cues.Pain in context: the effects of social context on pain-related fear and pain expression.The sound of silence:Tinnitus aurium elicited in an anechoic roomMost studies are conducted in the laboratory with healthy participants who are exposed to brief mild to moderate painful (or auditory) stimuli. Experimental manipulations are related to the primary research question, and can involve threat, interruptions, predictability, the presence of an observer etc. Typical dependent variables are pain intensity, pain sensitivity, fear of pain, eye blink startle reflex, facial expressions, and various reaction times. In collaboration with TRACE, the centre for translational psychological research, there are also possibilities top conduct experimental studies in patients with chronic pain at the ZOL hospital Genk (East Belgium)." "Centre for Computational Linguistics, Psycholinguistics and Sociolinguistics (CLiPS)" "Reinhild Vandekerckhove" "The research of CLiPS is interdisciplinary between linguistics, psychology, and computer science (Artificial Intelligence). Current research can be divided into three main areas: Psycholinguistics, Language Acquisition (coordinator: Steven Gillis). The main research topic is how very young children learn the language they hear. This process actually starts before babies use conventional words and phrases. That is why we study babies' vocalizations from birth onwards, focusing on how they become more and more 'word-like'. Once they start using words, we analyze the phonological development (the sound and syllable patterns words consist of, stress and intonation, 'speech errors') and morphophonological development (for instance, how do they learn diminutives or plurals?), and syntactic development (e.g., how do they learn the basic word order of Dutch?). Moreover, we study how young children learn the meanings of words and how they know how to use these new words correctly. A major area of research in language acquisition is the extent to which the language environment of the child provides enough information with which to learn language. At present we have an outspoken interest in language acquisition in children with different degrees of hearing: normally hearing children's language acquisition is compared with hearing impaired children with a conventional hearing aid and deaf children with 'received hearing' due to cochlear implantation. The research mainly focuses on the acquisition of Dutch as a first language. But there is also a firm emphasis on crosslinguistic studies in which the acquisition of particular phenomena is studied in typologically diverse languages. Psycholinguistics, Language Processing (coordinator: Dominiek Sandra). The focus is on the nature of the mental representations and processes underpinning online language use in experienced language users, more particularly in the domains of reading and spelling. In the study of reading our attention is primarily directed towards visual word recognition. The issues that we have addressed in recent years concern the role of morphological structure in lexical access and the question whether lexical access in bilinguals is language-selective or not. These topics are studied in reaction time experiments, using a variety of experimental paradigms. In our study of the spelling process we attempt to explain why descriptively simple, rule-governed word forms (Dutch verb forms) give rise to so many spelling errors among experienced spellers. Experiments and error corpora form two sources of empirical data. The central explanatory concepts in this research line are occurrence frequency of orthographic patterns at the lexical level and analogical processing at the sublexical level. Finally, we study the possibility of explaining language processing in morphosyntactic and syntactic domains in terms of exemplar-based analogy instead of rule application. Here, we rely on experimental and modeling work. Computational Linguistics (coordinator: Walter Daelemans). Basic research in Computational Linguistics at CLiPS is concerned with the study of computational methods for the representation, acquisition, and use of language knowledge. We focus on the application of statistical and machine learning methods, trained on corpus data, to explain human language acquisition and processing data, and to develop automatic text understanding systems that are accurate, efficient, and robust enough to be used in practical applications. We develop specific machine learning algorithms suited for the properties of language data (few regularities, many irregularities and exceptions), and develop new methodologies for simulation of these language data. Our strategic research is in the domain of Language Technology, the development of language processing tools to alleviate information and translation bottlenecks. Research focus here has been on text analytics (extracting knowledge from unstructured text data). Recently, the group has developed research initiatives on language technology for African languages, and on Digital Humanities (especially the areas of computational stylometry and language technology for the study of old variants of Dutch)." "Business Management" "Stephan Weemaes" "The Business Management Expertise Centre is a moving knowledge platform. It forms a link between companies (profit and non-profit), government and business training. Through practice-oriented and project-based research, it provides answers to specific business questions. Moreover, it shares its know-how with a wide range of specialised training courses. It is an ambitious player that wants to enter into a search for new opportunities with every driven organisation. The Business Management Expertise Centre offers practical and project-based research, market research, feasibility studies, efficiency measurements, name recognition surveys, customer satisfaction surveys, doctoral and press campaigns, translations and innovation projects, consultancy, project application writing tips and the development of specific training programmes." Ecosphere "Gudrun De Boeck" "The new research group ECOSPHERE has grown organically from the former ECOBE (Ecosystem Management) and the SPHERE (Systemic Physiological and Ecotoxicological Research) groups and combines the strengths of the available expertise in fundamental and applied research in aquatic ecology, and in aquatic and terrestrial ecotoxicology and ecophysiology. Our research group aims to underpin environmental management decisions with fundamental knowledge at different levels of organisation: from cell to ecosystem. It combines laboratory experiments, field investigations and mathematical modelling and goes beyond the impact studies towards solution-based research (mitigation and nature-based solutions). We focus on the interactions between organisms and physicochemical factors on all levels of biological organisation. Our main research themes are 1) Integrated water management; 2) Water and soil risk assessment; 3) Macro- and micronutrients for healthy ecosystems; 4) Bioavailability and accumulation of micro- and macro-contaminants; and 5) Physiological and molecular mechanisms of stress and toxicity of micro- and macro-contaminants." "Department of Biology" "Lut Arckens" "The research activities of the Biology Department are diverse, and include molecular and physiological studies at cellular and organismal level as well as ecological research focusing on populations, communities and ecosystems. Although many research groups carry out in-depth analyses on specific model organisms, the diversity of life forms studied by the department as a whole is impressive. Our studies are embedded in a dense network of international contacts with universities, research institutes and companies. The department attracts many students and hosts approximately 250 staff members. It has a yearly operational research budget of approximately 1500kEUR for both fundamental and applied research."