From October 1, Maxime André will be heading for Switzerland, where he will join the teams at the Software Institute of the Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI) in Lugano. Under the guidance of Prof. Michele Lanza, a leading researcher in software engineering, he will devote himself to a six-month scientific stay, furthering his doctoral thesis entitled "Supporting Database Evolution in Microservices" (doctoral thesis supervised by Prof. Anthony Cleve).


The SofinaBoël scholarship is an initiative of the SofinaBoël Fund for Education and Talent, created in 2011 by the Sofina holding company in collaboration with the descendants of Gustave Boël, a famous Belgian industrialist and politician. Managed with the King Baudouin Foundation and the FRS-FNRS, it aims to promote the education of talent in Belgium, by supporting young academics in their training abroad.

A historic precedent

The award of this grant to a researcher in computer science is a first in Belgium, underlining the excellence of the University of Namur. In the past, 3 Namur researchers had been rewarded in other disciplines: Alexandra de Heering, Élise Rousseau and Sébastien Vandenitte.

Certificat SofinaBoel de Maxime André

During his stay, Maxime André will focus on the challenges of database evolution and visualization in microservices architectures, an area that has become predominant in modern software development. His research aims to develop tools to facilitate the understanding and evolution of interactions between microservices and databases, a topic of crucial relevance to many industrial players.