Belgian scientists

Prince Emmanuel de Merode (Emmanuel Werner Marie Ghislain de Merode; born 5 May 1970) has been the director of Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) since 2008.

François, Baron Englert (born 6 November 1932) is a Belgian theoretical physicist and 2013 Nobel prize laureate.

Gerardus Mercator (5 March 1512 – 2 December 1594) was a 16th-century geographer, cosmographer and cartographer from the County of Flanders. He is most renowned for creating the 1569 world map based on a new projection which represented sailing courses of constant bearing (rhumb lines) as straight lines—an innovation that is still employed in nautical charts.

Jan Lauwereyns (born 13 May 1969), full name Johan Marc José Lauwereyns, is a writer and scientist. As a cognitive neuroscientist, he specializes in the voluntary control of attention and decision making. He has published articles in journals such as Nature, Neuron, and Trends in Cognitive Sciences, and the monographs The Anatomy of Bias and Brain and the Gaze with The MIT Press. As a multilingual poet, he gained an international reputation for innovative work.

Robert Cailliau (born 26 January 1947) is a Belgian informatics engineer, computer scientist and author who proposed the first (pre-www) hypertext system for CERN in 1987 and collaborated with Tim Berners-Lee on the World Wide Web from before it got its name. He designed the historical logo of the WWW, organized the first International World Wide Web Conference at CERN in 1994 and helped transfer Web development from CERN to the global Web consortium in 1995. Together with Dr. James Gillies, Cailliau wrote How the Web Was Born, the first book-length account of the origins of the World Wide Web.

Sylvain Julien Victor Arend (6 August 1902 – 18 February 1992) was a Belgian astronomer born in Robelmont, Luxembourg province, Belgium. His main interest was astrometry.

Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau (14 October 1801 – 15 September 1883) was a Belgian physicist and mathematician. He was one of the first people to demonstrate the illusion of a moving image. To do this, he used counterrotating disks with repeating drawn images in small increments of motion on one and regularly spaced slits in the other. He called this device of 1832 the phenakistiscope.

Michaël Gillon (born 1974) is a Belgian astronomer and astrophysicist. His research focuses on exoplanets and he conducts his research at the University of Liège. He holds a master's degree in biochemistry and astrophysics and also a PhD in astrophysics, and completed his post-doctorate at Geneva Observatory.

Godfried Wendelen or Govaert Wendelen, Latinized Godefridus Wendelinus, or sometimes Vendelinus and in French-language sources referred to as Godefroy Wendelin (6 June 1580 – 24 October 1667) was an astronomer and Catholic priest sometimes referred to as the Ptolemy of his time. He was a supporter of Copernican heliocentrism, the astronomical model which positioned the sun at the center of the universe, with earth and the other planets orbiting around it. He made more accurate measurements of the distance to the sun as previously made by the ancient Greek astronomer Aristarchus of Samos. He is considered by some as a precursor of Kepler and Newton. He stayed in the Provence where he met Peiresc with whom he remained in contact throughout his life. The crater Vendelinus on the Moon is named after him.

Steven Laureys (born 24 December 1968 in Leuven) is a Belgian neurologist. He is recognized worldwide as a leading clinician and researcher in the field of neurology of consciousness.