In early June, the 19th International Research Symposium on Service Excellence in Management (QUIS19) was held in Rome, one of the most important conferences in the field of service management. An enriching experience in more ways than one for Victor Sluÿters, a PhD student at the NaDI-CeRCLe research center, who was awarded the "Best Paper Award" by an international jury from over 350 papers.

"Typically, the award is given to a presentation that fits in with the conference theme, which this year focused on digital and sustainable transformation.Although my research project is currently attracting quite a bit of attention, it deviated quite a bit from this theme. So I didn't expect to win an award," confides Victor Sluÿters.

An original approach to crisis management

The thesis paper by Victor Sluÿters - whose work is supervised by Professors Wafa Hammedi (UNamur), Yves Van Vaerenbergh (KU Leuven) and Thomas Leclercq (IÉSEG School of Management) - focuses on data breaches (or data breach) and their management by companies. These are well-known threats feared by organizations for their potentially severe and far-reaching consequences.

Victor Sluÿters focuses more specifically on the psychological mechanisms of shame that underpin employee behavior in a crisis context. This emotion has strong and lasting effects on employee commitment, performance and well-being. Companies therefore have a vested interest in understanding the behavioral mechanisms at work to better cope with this type of event. It was this in-depth psychological dimension of crisis management, still relatively unexplored in the literature, that convinced the QUIS jury.

A human adventure above all

Beyond the scientific recognition, Victor Sluÿters insists on the human aspect of his research work. "We started our thesis at the same time as Floriane [Goosse] and Florence [Nizette]. We really help each other out. We organized very critical proofreading sessions, sometimes tough, but always benevolent.""What's more, we're lucky enough to benefit from excellent support from our promoter, Professor Wafa Hammedi, from both a research and human point of view. And for my part, I can also count on the invaluable insight and support of my two other co-promoters, Yves Van Vaerenbergh and Thomas Leclercq, who contribute enormously to enriching this adventure.", continues the young researcher.

Four researchers obtained a mandat d'aspirant enabling them to start doctoral research:

• Ludovic DUBOIS and Niccolò PARDINI from the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters,
• Jordan ABRAS from the Faculty of Economics Management Communication sciencesPo (EMCP)
• Noah DEVEAUX from the Faculty of Science.

Success is also on the cards for the postdoctoral researchers, nine of whom have been awarded a research fellowship for 3 years.

• Audrey LEPRINCE, Ciska DE RUYVER, Dmytro STRILETS and Cinzia TOMASELLI from the Faculty of Sciences
• Nicolas MICHEL, Sébastien VANDENITTE and Manon HOUTART from the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters
• Pierre-Yves HUREL and Sebastian RONDEROS from the Faculty of Economics Management Communication sciencesPo (EMCP).

In addition, two new qualified researchers join our university.

• Marie DELABY in the Biology Department of the Faculty of Science
• Matthieu PIGNOT in the History Department of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters

Three Namur researchers have also obtained funding from the Télévie call.

• Marc HENNEQUART for research aimed at highlighting new metabolic biomarkers for better detection of pancreatic cancer
• Carine MICHIELS for research into the resistance of glioblastoma to radiotherapy combined with chemotherapy
• Anne-Catherine HEUSKIN for research into understanding the reprogramming of macrophage immune cells in the formation of the tumor microenvironment.

Frédéric SILVESTRE (Faculty of Science, Department of Biology, URBE) has also been awarded funding for a FNRS-FRQ collaborative project with ULiège and Quebec teams from the Université de Montréal and the Université du Québec à Montréal. The aims of this project are to develop a new method of age determination based on molecular modifications (epigenetic clock) in beluga whales (Delphinapterus leucas) from the St. Lawrence estuary in Quebec, and to understand the role of age on contaminant accumulation as well as on their stress levels and health status. This will enable better decisions to be made to improve the recovery of this endangered population. As part of this project, two doctoral theses (one in Namur and one in Montreal) are open. Candidates must be biologists (or degree deemed equivalent) with an interest in conservation and ecotoxicology issues, and with experience in molecular biology (omics) and bioinformatics.

Congratulations to them!

Benoit Decerf, holder of a PhD in cotutelle between UCLouvain and the University of Bielefeld (Germany), joined the University of Namur in 2016. His career path led him to significant experience as a researcher, notably from 2020 to 2025, when he was seconded to the World Bank's research center in Washington DC. In this context, he contributed to the development of tools designed to measure poverty and well-being. The aim? To better understand development inequalities between countries and better assess development policies.

"Indeed, it seems difficult to quantify a person's state of health in euros. To address the limitations of monetary indicators, alternatives such as the Human Development Index or multidimensional poverty measures have been proposed to include aspects such as life expectancy and access to education," he continues. At the Development Economics Research Center, Benoit Decerf's work is part of these efforts to improve development indicators.

His stint at the World Bank allowed him to take part in improving the indicators used by this institution. "In addition to measuring extreme poverty, defined by the threshold of $2.15 per day per person, which the United Nations would like to see fall below 3% of the world's population by 2030, the World Bank also measures "shared prosperity". This concept is intended to be more inclusive than poverty, by taking into account the incomes of everyone, not just the poor, but maintaining the importance of inequalities by weighting the incomes of the least well-off more heavily", explains the economics researcher. With his co-authors, Benoit Decerf has therefore proposed a new indicator, the Prosperity Gap, which aims to be both simple to explain and mindful of inequalities.

This example illustrates the pragmatic approach followed in his research. Rather than looking for the ideal indicator, Benoit Decerf seeks to build on existing indicators, identifying their main limitations, and seeking to improve them while taking into account the constraints faced by practitioners.

After winning the prestigious "Best Research Paper Award" at the SERVSIG conference by the American Marketing Association in 2024 for her thesis paper, Floriane Goosse, a researcher at the NaDI-CeRCLe research center, is among the two winners of the ServCollab Scholarship 2025, an international doctoral scholarship awarded by an American organization dedicated to promoting scientific research with high societal impact.

No fewer than 37 doctoral students from universities around the world were in the running to receive this scholarship. Two researchers were chosen after an in-depth selection process: Griffin Colaizzi, a PhD student in psychology at Northeastern University (USA), and Floriane Goosse, a PhD student at UNamur within NaDI-CeRCLE.

New technologies to empower people with disabilities

Supervised by Professors Wafa Hammedi (UNamur) and Dominik Mahr (Maastricht University), Floriane Goosse's thesis explores how new technologies, such as intelligent voice assistants, can empower people with disabilities, particularly the visually impaired, and thus significantly improve their well-being.

A high-potential project that convinced the members of the ServCollab jury, made up of eminent researchers in the field. The jury was particularly impressed by the young researcher's methodological rigor and praised her alignment with the principles of Transformative Service Research as well as her deep determination to create a tangible impact on the lives of so-called vulnerable people.

Triple recognition for Floriane Goosse

Floriane Goosse also took part in the 19th International Research Symposium on Service Excellence in Management (QUIS19), the bi-annual benchmark conference in service management, held in Rome in early June. On this occasion, his research once again distinguished itself by winning the prize for best research with societal impact, awarded by the conference's scientific committee. This prestigious international recognition crowns a rigorous and deeply committed body of work. Three major recognitions in less than a year, saluting both the scientific excellence and the strong societal impact of a particularly promising piece of research.