Rate My Professor Diederik Rousseau

Diederik Rousseau is an associate professor in the Department of Green Chemistry and Technology within the Faculty of Bioscience Engineering at Ghent University. He graduated in 1999 as a bio-engineer specialized in environmental engineering from Ghent University and obtained his PhD in Applied Biological Sciences in 2005 from the same university, with a dissertation entitled 'Optimisation of model-based design and operation of constructed wetlands'. From 2005 to 2011, he served as Lecturer/Senior Lecturer in Environmental Engineering at the UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education in Delft, The Netherlands, where he was co-responsible for the Masters Programme in Environmental Science and conducted research on natural systems for wastewater treatment focused on developing countries. Since 2011, following his return to Belgium and the 2013 integration of University College West-Flanders into Ghent University, he has been a professor at Ghent University Campus Kortrijk, coordinating the Master of Science in Engineering Technology – option Environmental Engineering.

As co-director of the Laboratory for Industrial Water and Eco Technology (LIWET), Rousseau's research interests include nature-based solutions such as constructed wetlands for sustainable recovery of water and nutrients, applied aquatic ecology, waste stabilization ponds, and algae technology. His work emphasizes optimization through experimental setups and model-based design, with demonstrations at pilot and full scale. Rousseau has supervised numerous MSc and PhD theses, resulting in 38 peer-reviewed SCI-noted papers, 8 book chapters, and 39 papers in international conference proceedings. Key publications encompass 'Model-based design of horizontal subsurface flow constructed wetlands' (2004), 'Contaminant removal processes in subsurface flow constructed wetlands' (2010), '3D model for a secondary facultative pond' (2011), 'Reactive transport simulation in a tropical horizontal subsurface flow constructed wetland' (2013), and more recent contributions like 'Lab-scale evaluation of microalgal-bacterial granular sludge' (2024) and 'Microplastics in two different constructed wetlands systems' (2024). He serves as a regular reviewer for various journals, is the founding organizer of the WETPOL symposium series, and has participated in several conference scientific committees, significantly impacting the field of environmental engineering.