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Michel Lavrauw (Izegem 1974) is a post-doctoral member of the research group Incidence Geometry at the Department of Pure Mathematics and Computer Algebra at Ghent University (Belgium). He is currently supported by a research grant from FWO (Research Foundation - Flanders). He graduated from Ghent University with a degree in Mathematics in 1996, with a thesis on Knot Theory, supervised by Wim Mielants.
In 1997, he started working on his PhD at the Department of Discrete Mathematics at Eindhoven University of Technology, supervised by Aart Blokhuis and Andries E. Brouwer. His research was focussed on scattered spaces in higher dimensional projective spaces over finite fields and their relation with blocking sets. In 2000, he spent six months at the University of Western Australia on a research visit working on the theory of translation generalised quadrangles in collaboration with Tim Penttila.
After obtaining his PhD in 2001, he was awarded a Marie Curie Individual Fellowship as part of the European Commission's 5th Framework Programme. This allowed him to further develop as an independent researcher, at Naples University's Department of Mathematics, in the research group Geometric and Combinatorial Structures and their Applications, with Guglielmo Lunardon as scientist in charge.
After this two-year research position, he was employed by Barcelona's Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) to collaborate with the research group at the Department of Applied Mathematics within an European Commission-funded Research Training Network Combinatorial Structure of Intractable Problems (COMBSTRU).
In 2004, he was awarded an Innovational Research Incentives Scheme VENI grant, funded by NWO (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research) for his project Semifields and related structures in finite geometry, with Eindhoven University of Technology as host institution.
He moved back to Ghent in September 2006 to focus on his current work. Over the course of the different stages of his academic career, he has become skilled in applying many of the most powerful techniques in finite geometry and has gained valuable experience in collaborating with a wide variety of international researchers.