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.

This article is taken from the March 2025 "The Day When" section of Omalius magazine.

Who hasn't been delighted to discover a postcard in their letterbox? Today, as in the past, this little piece of cardboard circulates over distances of varying length, letting people know, in pictures and a few words, that we're being thought of. Although the use of postcards is declining these days due to competition from digital communications, they have long played a fundamental communicative role in our society. As soon as they were launched in Austria in 1869 (they arrived in Belgium two years later), they met with great success, which lasted at least until the Second World War. They were often used to make appointments, to acknowledge receipt of a parcel, or simply to check on a loved one. Very quickly, amateurs became passionate about these documents, which were accessible to all due to their modest price, and built up veritable collections of them.

From the 1890s onwards, chromolithographic or photographic views replaced the advertising content that had prevailed until then. These images were invaluable testimonials: illustrated newspapers were expensive (and therefore inaccessible to the majority), and cinema was still in its infancy at the beginning of the 20th century. The postcard thus became an eminently popular medium. It was not uncommon to have individual or family portraits printed in postcard format and sent to friends and family, at a time when the camera was not the everyday object it is today. In most cases, the image chosen by the sender indicated to the recipient the place from which the card had been sent: those featuring remarkable landscapes or monuments were therefore particularly sought-after.

The thousands of postcards preserved at the BUMP, more than 3,000 of which are already digitized on the library's digitization portal (https://neptun.unamur.be/), thus enable us to discover the face of various Belgian cities at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. The BUMP collection includes, among others, over 400 digitized maps depicting Namur at that time: the city is revealed through panoramas taken from the citadel, photographs of its most famous buildings (the cathedral, the citadel, the theater, the train station...) or views of the Sambre, the Meuse or the Rochers des Grands-Malades (between Namur and Beez).

Among this set of views of Namur are twenty-three postcards that reveal the university campus as it was in 1937. The series was produced, probably at the request of the institution, by Namur photographer Jean Lemaire (1891-1967), who was renowned for his portraits and for his work on heritage. The series was so successful that it was republished several times, with the addition of a few new images. The postcards show the infrastructures that once housed the Faculties' research and teaching activities. These include the dome of the historic astronomical observatory, which stood on the site of today's Observatoire Antoine Thomas sj at UNamur, and the facade of the library, then located on rue Grafé. While the appearance of some buildings has changed relatively little, this is not the case, for example, with the former Faculty of Science, also immortalized in the series, which has since been demolished and replaced by a more modern construction.

Jean Lemaire's photographs also highlight the spaces that were made available to students and staff. Several shots show the appearance of the auditoriums of the time, already equipped with folding seats, and the practical rooms, such as the microscopy room (image 1) or the physics and chemistry laboratories. The stacks and consultation room of the Belles Lettres library, from which several readers can be seen (image 2), also come into view. Places devoted to moments of relaxation are not forgotten: several views thus immortalize the bar (image 3), the refectory, the billiard room or even the circle room.

The series of postcards allows us to identify and date the scientific and educational equipment used at the time. Alongside Mendeleïev's tables and other didactic panels, the shots show several instruments used by chemists or physicists, including an Atwood machine, which made it possible to reduce the acceleration of motion and verify the laws of falling bodies. We also discover the use of "Brendel" models, splendid papier-mâché teaching aids used in the botany study room (image 4), or that of a "repro camera", which was used to obtain extremely precise photographic reproductions, for example, of scientific and technical drawings. While many of these pieces are now preserved at the BUMP (such as the botanical models) or within the departments concerned, others have disappeared over time and are known only through this series of photographs.

The collection of postcards preserved at the BUMP thus constitutes a precious testimony to the society that saw their birth. Vectors of a major social and emotional bond in the 19th and 20th centuries, these little pieces of cardboard provide irreplaceable documentation on the history of the city and the University of Namur, and document a societal practice that is almost obsolete today, in the age of the instantaneous and digital. This collection is now freely accessible, via the BUMP digitization portal, to anyone curious about our heritage.

Olivier Latteur

With its 5,000 employees, CHU UCL Namur is a unique field of study. A university hospital and the leading private employer in the province of Namur, it combines care, teaching and research missions, while facing the challenges of a constantly evolving organization. In this context, better structuring projects, reinforcing strategic steering and intelligently integrating technological innovation is becoming an imperative to guarantee the efficiency of processes and the sustainability of the reforms undertaken.

In contrast to other sectors, where projects are often entrusted to professionals trained in classic project management methodologies, hospitals rely mainly on non-professional project managers. These players, be they doctors, nurses, pharmacists, biologists, administrative staff, etc., regularly find themselves piloting strategic initiatives without dedicated project management training. Kevin Lejeune is interested in this reality, and seeks to understand how their intrinsic motivation and ability to structure initiatives in an informal setting influence the success of hospital projects. His doctoral thesis is part of a wider reflection on the balance between professionalization and organizational agility, supported by the academic expertise of UNamur.

While the sponsor is often presented as a key figure in projects, his role remains unclear and unevenly invested in reality. To what extent does his real involvement and interaction with the project manager influence the success of hospital initiatives? Drawing on the theory of leader-member exchange, Kevin Lejeune sets out to demonstrate that it's not so much the presence of the sponsor that matters, as the quality of his or her commitment. His work highlights three essential levers: the sponsor's concrete actions, his relational qualities and his level of involvement. This theoretical framework, nurtured by regular exchanges with the academic world of the EMCP Faculty, aims to provide tangible recommendations for rethinking leadership in hospital governance and better structuring the support of project managers.

The rise of artificial intelligence in healthcare opens up promising prospects, but also raises organizational and psychological resistance. How can we ensure that these tools do not remain isolated experiments, but become genuine catalysts for innovation within healthcare establishments? This is the issue that Kevin Lejeune explores in the final part of his research. He aims to identify the factors that influence the acceptance and integration of AI tools into hospital processes. Far from taking a purely technological approach, he focuses on the psychological and behavioral barriers that condition the adoption of these innovations. In particular, it analyzes the impact of perceived competence, self-esteem and professional recognition on the adoption of AI tools. By crossing hospital fieldwork and academic contributions, notably from UNamur, the aim is to propose implementation strategies adapted to the human dynamics specific to hospitals.

Through this thesis, Kevin Lejeune aims to offer hospitals operational keys to improve the management of their projects, structure the role of sponsors and support the adoption of technological innovations. Combining scientific rigor with a grounding in the field, his work is based on a dual approach: deciphering hospital organizational mechanisms to identify levers for improvement, and ensuring that these recommendations can be implemented pragmatically.