Biography
Professor Dr. Bert Blocken (*1974, Hasselt/Belgium) holds a PhD in Civil Engineering from KU Leuven in Belgium. He is full professor of Mechanical Engineering/Aerospace Engineering at Heriot-Watt University in Scotland, the UK. He will also join Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology in Finland soon as a part-time full professor of Urban Physics. His main areas of expertise are subsonic aerodynamics, urban physics, wind tunnel testing, CFD, sports aerodynamics & defence technology.
He is a Guest Professor at the National University "Kyiv Aviation Institute" in Ukraine and at the von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics in Belgium. He also acts as Guest Professor for the Certificate in Advanced Studies (CAS) in Cycling Coaching by the University of Lausanne and the International Cycling Union (UCI).
He has published 260 papers in international peer-reviewed journals. His h-index values are 84, 90, 106 on Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar, respectively. He has graduated 35 PhD students. He developed the first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) in urban physics and sports aerodynamics, called "Sports & Building Aerodynamics" on the Coursera platform. According to the 2016 Academic Ranking of World Universities (Shanghai Ranking) & Elsevier, he was among the 150 most cited researchers world-wide both in the field of Civil Engineering and in the field of Energy Science & Engineering. He is listed as 2018-2024 Highly Cited Researcher by Clarivate Analytics (Web of Science) in the field of Engineering for production of multiple highly cited papers that rank in the top 1% by citations for field and year in Web of Science Core Collection, ranking him in about the top 0.1% researchers in his field according to Clarivate Analytics. He was listed as one of 15 engineers world-wide "who mattered in 2020" by Engineering.com. His first paper on COVID-19, ventilation and fitness centers was ranked by Altmetric in the top 0.003% of tracked articles.
He is Editor of the peer-reviewed journal Building & Environment and Associate Editor of the journal Sports Engineering. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Wind Engineering & Industrial Aerodynamics, Building Simulation, and the journal Advances in Wind Engineering.
He had the privilege to provide scientific support to a range of unique sports achievements. Between 2017 and 2023, he acted as aerodynamics advisor for professional cycling Team Jumbo-Visma (formerly called LottoNL-Jumbo, now Visma-Lease-a-Bike), supporting the time trial riders (Primoz Roglic, Wout van Aert, Tom Dumoulin, Jonas Vingegaard and others) by CFD simulations and wind tunnel testing. This way he had a modest contribution to two grand classification wins in the Tour de France (2022, 2023), three in the Vuelta of Spain (2019, 2020, 2021) and one in the Giro of Italy (2023); and to the wins of one gold and one silver medal in the Individual Time Trial in the Tokyo Olympics (2021). He collaborated with Cycling Ireland and Paralympics Ireland leading to two gold medals and one silver medal at the Tokyo Paralympics. He also contributed to the INEOS 1:59 Challenge where Kenian athlete Eliud Kipchoge ran the first marathon below 2 hours (2019), and to the Pho3nix Sub7 event, where Norwegian triathlete Kristian Blummenfelt achieved the first triathlon below below 7 hours (2022). He also helped Joost Vandendries to break the Belgian record speedski (218,845 km/h in 2019), and assisted Dutch skater Kjeld Nuis and Red Bull to break the world record speed skating (2018; 2022).
He established a World Record with the largest CFD Sports Simulation together with Ansys & HPE and a second World Record of the largest CFD simulation with commercial CFD software with Ansys and Microsoft on a 6 billion cell stadium study in the COVID pandemic.