He obtained a Bsc in Computer Science from the Limburgs Universitair Centrum, Belgium in 1999, and a Msc in Computer Science from Maastricht University, the Netherlands in 2001. Subsequently he was a Research Assistant of the prestigious Research Foundation - Flanders until 2005, when he obtained his Ph.D. from the “transnationale Universiteit Limburg” (Belgium and the Netherlands). Prior to his move to ULB, from 2005-2009, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation - Flanders. He has published about 35 papers in top conferences and journals and is interested in provenance in scientific databases; database programming languages; the foundations and expressiveness of query languages for XML and RDF; and index structures and query processing for the Semantic Web.