Dr. Walter De Brouwer

Walter De Brouwer, Ph.D. is a Belgian futurist, semiotician, and internet entrepreneur. He is currently CEO Europe at OLPC Foundation, Director at Tau Zero Foundation, and Entrepreneur in Residence at University of Cambridge.
 
Walter was educated at the University of Ghent from where he holds an MA in linguistics. He earned his Ph.D. in Semiotics from the Catholic Tilburg University in the Netherlands. Until 1989 he was a lecturer at the Jesuit University of Antwerp (UFSIA) and a faculty professor at the International University of Monaco from 2001–2004. He has been a member of the Center for Entrepreneurial Learning (Judge Business School, rank 7 globally) of the University of Cambridge (UK) since 2004. He sits on the editorial team of the Journal for Chinese Entrepreneurship. At the moment he is preparing a Ph.D. in Development economics at his alma mater, the University of Ghent.
 
In 2008, Walter became the CEO of OLPC Europe, the European branch of (MIT Media Lab’s) Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop per Child, a position he currently holds. The foundation is located at the campus of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) in Belgium and collaborates with the King Baudouin Foundation. He is also the president of the Belgian chapter of Silicon Valley’s Founder Institute, and the curator of TEDxBrussels. He was founder and CEO of Starlab, an interdisciplinary research institute modeled on the MIT media lab.
 
Since 2003, he is a director of the Tau Zero Foundation, formerly known as NASA’s Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Program which recently published the state-of-the-art work The Frontiers of Propulsion Science. In 1998, he organized the ‘First International Conference of Quantum Information and Computation’ at the Hotel Metropole in Brussels — sponsored by the European Office of Aerospace Research and Development of the United States Air Force. He also sponsored the Centre for Quantum Computation of the University of Oxford (United Kingdom). Together with the British Interplanetary Society (BIS), Tau Zero started Project Icarus (the son of Project Daedalus) on September 30, 2009, to design an interstellar probe to go to Barnard’s Star before the end of the 21st century. Icarus will utilize fusion based engine technology which would accelerate the spacecraft to close to 20% the speed of light.
 
Watch his Vimeo videos. Watch TEDxBrussels – Walter de Brouwer – 2/13/10. Read his LinkedIn profile. Read Starlab Biographies: Walter de Brouwer. Visit his Facebook page. Follow his Twitter feed. View his Flickr Photostream.