Thomas Standaert obtained a Master in Business Engineering (Major: Finance) at Ghent University in 2013. In October 2013, he started as a Research and Teaching Assistant at the Department of Accounting, Corporate Finance and Taxation under the supervision of Prof. dr. ir. Sophie Manigart. Since then, he has enrolled in a Joint PhD program with Université Lille 2 (Lille, France), and received a research grant from the Flemish Agency for Innovation by Science and Technology (IWT). His research, which focuses on government venture capital, has been presented at the 2017 Babson College Entrepreneurship Research Conference (Norman, OK, USA), 2017 Financing and Governance of Innovative Companies conference (Dijon, France), 2015 Economics of Entrepreneurship and Innovation workshop (Trier, Germany) and 2015 Belgian Entrepreneurship Research Day (Namur, Belgium). His first paper, co-authored with Prof. dr. ir. Sophie Manigart, was published in Small Business Economics. From January 2017 until July 2017, he was a visiting scholar at EMLYON Business School (Lyon, France). Furthermore, he has been involved in research projects commissioned by the Walloon Institute for Evaluation, Prospective and Statistics, ParticipatieMaatschappij Vlaanderen and the Brabant Development Agency.
