Practical
Thursday, 22 October, 2026
- 17:00 until 18:15
VUB Main Campus Etterbeek
Pleinlaan 2
1050 Elsene
Venue: Building I
Pleinlaan 2
1050 Elsene
Venue: Building I
Free of charge
Registration until
Vrije Universiteit Brussel and professor Wim Thiery warmly invite you for the inaugural lecture on his ERC-funded project LACRIMA. In 'So, will you live an unprecedented life?' Thiery takes a shortcut from climate change to the societal questions concerning global warming.
Under a continued increase in global warming, extreme events such as heatwaves will further rise in frequency, intensity, and duration over the next decades. Climate change impact studies routinely assess hazard and exposure change across discrete time windows but thereby ignore how vulnerability and climate risk evolve across a person’s lifetime. Conversely, demographic research has a long tradition of assessing population processes and vulnerability from a cohort perspective but generally neglects climate impacts.
In this new ERC project, we will develop novel concepts and methodologies to express climate change impacts and risk from a cohort perspective. By bridging physical climate science, demography, and planetary health, LACRIMA will comprehensively identify whether and where people will live an unprecedented life in terms of climate impacts, and how mitigation choices can alter the climate change burden on current young generations around the world.
Wim Thiery at the VUB Main Campus
About Wim Thiery
Professor Wim Thiery is a climate scientist focused on modelling extreme events in a changing climate. His expertise includes climate change, climate extremes, regional and global climate modelling, global-scale climate impact modelling, impact attribution, land-atmosphere interactions, land management, storm early warnings, and energy meteorology. In 2017 (age 29), he was appointed as research professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, where he established the bclimate group. With over 1000 media contributions since 2014, he is one of Belgium’s leading climate science communicators. During his research, he undertook research exchanges to Montréal, Berlin, and Zurich, and conducted field campaigns to Uganda, Rwanda, and DR Congo to install automatic weather stations on Lake Kivu and Lake Victoria. Thiery is contributing author of the IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land (2019) and the Sixth Assessment Report (2021).
In his ongoing ERC Consolidator Grant, he and his bclimate group are deepening the research at the interface of physical climate change and intergenerational justice. In 2017, Forbes magazine elected him as a member of the “Forbes 30 under 30 Europe”, bringing together “the brightest young entrepreneurs, innovators and game changers in Europe”. In 2023, he received one of the Arne Richter Awards for Outstanding Early Career Scientists from the European Geosciences Union. In 2024, he received the Scientific Award Climate Research, awarded by the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO), and was selected as Laureate of the Academy – Class Natural Sciences, by the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium.
About the European Research Council (ERC)
The European Research Council (ERC) provides funding for the implementation of ground-breaking research for a period of 5 (6) years. The ERC programme, provides a distinctive funding mechanism devoted to scientific excellence for all scientific fields.
Currently, Vrije Universiteit Brussel proudly hosts more than 20 ERC-projects and their Principal Investigators.
The world needs you
This initiative is part of VUB's public programme, a programme for everyone who believes that scientific knowledge, critical thinking and dialogue are an important first step to create impact in the world.
As an Urban Engaged University, VUB aims to be a driver of change in the world. With our academic edcuational programmes and innovative research, we contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations and to making a difference locally and globally.
