Prof. dr. ir. Pieter Vansteenwegen is an associate professor at the Centre of Industrial Management, Traffic and Infrastructure at KU Leuven and he is the chair of the KU Leuven Mobility Research Centre. He was previously a visiting professor at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Barcelona in 2012. His research focusses on the development of more robust public transportation services and the development of metaheuristics for solving complex logistic and public transportation planning problems. For this research, he was awarded with one of the 10 best papers of the International Association of Railway Operations Research (IAROR) in 2017, the "Young Railway Operations Research Award 2013" of IAROR, the "BIVEC-GIBET PhD Transportation Research Award 2009" of the Benelux Interuniversity Group of Transportation Economists and the First Prize of the "Management Science in Railroad Applications 2005 Student Research Paper Contest" of RASIG - INFORMS. He published more than 40 papers in international reviewed journals such as "Transportation Science", "European Journal of Operational Research", "Computers & Operations Research", "Transportation Research Part B" and "Omega - International Journal of Management Science".  He currently has an H-index of 20 (Web of Science) and supervised 7 finished PhDs. 

His research focusses on the development of metaheuristics for solving complex logistic, transportation, and supply chain management problems.

His research vision is to use both theory and experiment to create novel algorithms, mechanisms, and systems that enable to support decision making processes. His research projects have touched on various areas within Operations Research, Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science more broadly including: algorithm and complexity, data analytics, planning and scheduling, recommender systems and optimization.  
He published research papers in international reviewed journals such as "European Journal of Operational Research", Computers & Operations Research", "Journal of the Operational Research Society" and "Computers & Industrial Engineering". One of his research works has been awarded as the second best paper of the 17^thAsia Pacific Industrial Engineering and Management Conference in 2017.