About Me

Currently a researcher at KU Leuven working on LLMs and fairness. Creator of RobBERT, a widely-used Dutch language model (25k+ monthly downloads, 300+ citations) ranking in the global top 80 on Hugging Face. Research on tokenization, efficient cross-lingual transfer and fairness in AI published at ICML'24, NAACL'25, NAACL'24, EMNLP'24, and COLM'24 among others (h-index: 12).

Professional Experience

KU Leuven logo
Sep. 2025 - present Researcher at KU Leuven Leuven, Belgium

Working on large language models and fairness in AI systems.

Aleph Alpha logo
Nov. 2024 - Aug. 2025 LLM Engineer at Aleph Alpha Berlin, Germany

Led R&D of translation and explainability techniques, demonstrated to EU parliament. Contributed to research on bias mitigation and LLM steering. Developed various inference-related features, e.g. multi-node Deepseek over Infiniband.

pieter.ai
Jul. 2024 - present AI Technical Expert (Development, Speaking, Advisory) Leuven, Belgium

Led workshops on the workings of LLMs and AI safety for clients, e.g. KBC senior management. Developed LLMQ Python package for scheduling large LLM inference jobs. NLP Expert for the EU AI Office's code of practice for foundation models.

KU Leuven logo
Dec. 2023 - Oct. 2024 Postdoctoral Researcher at KU Leuven Leuven, Belgium

Led development of tokenization research and released BübleLM-2B with HU Berlin. Research visit to Alan Akbik's group at HU Berlin. Lecturer for the NLP course at KULAK. Member of the KU Leuven GenAI committee.

Apple logo
Jun. 2023 - Sep. 2023 Machine Learning Intern at Apple Inc. Cambridge, UK

Led AurA project on controlling LLMs for toxicity reduction, published at ICML 2024. Worked with state-of-the-art models: Falcon 7B/40B, OPT, MPT, Mistral. Collaborated with researchers in Barcelona, Paris and Cambridge.

KU Leuven logo
Aug. 2019 — Dec. 2023 PhD Researcher at KU Leuven Leuven, Belgium

PhD on fairer foundation models at the DTAI lab with Prof. Luc De Raedt and Prof. Bettina Berendt. Developed RobBERT, a Dutch language model ranking in the global top 80 on Hugging Face. Experience with major language models (Falcon, OPT, MPT) and research visits to MilaNLP and Weizenbaum Institute.

Nokia Bell Labs
2017 - 2018 Master Thesis Intern at Nokia Bell Labs Antwerp, Belgium

Conducted research on fault analysis in a distributed stream processing system.

Education

KU Leuven logo
2019 - 2023 PhD in Computer Science Leuven, Belgium

Thesis on bias mitigation in large language models, supervised by Prof. Luc De Raedt and Prof. Bettina Berendt.

KU Leuven logo
2018 - 2019 Advanced Master in Artificial Intelligence Leuven, Belgium

Focus on machine learning and computer vision. Thesis on obstacle detection with Prof. Johan Suykens and CNH Industrial.

KU Leuven logo
2017 - 2018 Master of Electronics and ICT Engineering Technology Ghent, Belgium

Focus on distributed systems. Thesis on failure detection in stream processing at Nokia Bell Labs.

Academic Service & Impact

Academic Community

Organized the LLM session at the Flanders AI Research Day. Received Best Student Paper at FAccT 2022. Previously lecturer of NLP (2024) and TA for AI fundamentals courses (2019-2024).

Active in the research community as program committee member and reviewer for top-tier conferences.

Venues: FAccT (2020, 2022), ACL (2023), IJCAI (2022, 2023), ECML-PKDD, ARR (2022-present)

Advisory & Supervision

Contributing expertise as NLP Expert for the EU AI Office's code of practice and member of the KU Leuven GenAI expert committee. Industry collaborations with VDAB and language learning centers.

Currently (co-)supervising Thomas Bauwens on tokenization and cross-lingual transfer for his PhD. Previously supervised 15+ master's theses, leading to an ICCC'21 publication and collaborations with TU Berlin and Acapela on resume writing and prosody prediction.