Download my full academic CV (last updated: October 2025).

Here’s my old (~2019) non-academic CV as a 1 pager.

Quick Facts

• Name: Tom Van Cutsem
• Nationality: Belgian
• Residence: Leuven, Belgium
• Language proficiency: Dutch (Mother Tongue), English (Fluent)
• Degree: PhD, Computer Science
• Profession: professor, R&D team leader, computer science researcher, software architect, software technologist

Past work that I am proud of

• At KU Leuven, I designed a full semester Blockchain course as part of the Advanced Master in Cybersecurity.
• I designed the Unix Game, an online coding game built for the occasion of the 50th birthday of the Unix operating system. A few days after launch the game went viral, attracting thousands of players and tens of thousands of visitors worldwide.
• Designed a search engine for software packages called Code Compass powered by unsupervised machine learning algorithms (joint work with colleagues from Nokia Bell Labs).
• Built a wide-area distributed stream processing platform for IoT called World-wide Streams (joint work with multiple colleagues from Nokia Bell Labs).
• Contributed to the JavaScript (ECMAScript) standard. Designed the ECMAScript 2015 Proxy and Reflect reflection APIs (joint work with Mark S. Miller from Google).
• Together with Stijn Mostinckx at the University of Brussels, designed and implemented the distributed, open-source AmbientTalk programming language.
• Organized the 2013 Flemish Programming Contest, a regional ACM-style programming contest, attracting 500 participants.
• Author of reflect.js, a Javascript reflection library making the ECMAScript 6 reflection API available on current platforms.
• Together with Dries Harnie, Joeri De Koster and Theo D’Hondt, designed SchemeKen, a distributed, resilient dialect of Scheme.
• Author of traits.js, a minimal trait composition library for Javascript.
• Independently developed a 26-hour lecture series at university Master-level on multicore programming and an introductory university Bachelor-level course on distributed systems.
• Author of stm-in-clojure, a meta-circular implementation of software-transactional memory in Clojure. I use this library for teaching STM in my university course on multicore programming.
• As a CS undergrad student, I enjoyed working on hands-on programming projects including a compiler for a C-like language for the JVM written in C++, a mobile agent travel reservation system in Java, a resource scheduler written in Prolog, a 3D rendering engine based on Binary Space Partitions, a text-based RPG, and a spreadsheet all written in Scheme (now Racket).