Prof. Isabelle Thomas studied geography at the University of Namur  and Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium) where she also got her PhD in 1984. She is nowadays Research Director at the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research and (extraordinary) professor at the Department of Geography of the U.C.L. (Université catholique de Louvain).  She is heading CORE as Research Director for the period 2016-2019.

Her main research interests are in (1) modelling the location of human activities and more particularly the sensitivity of the models to their inputs, but also understanding the spatial structure of (urban) human activities and transportation fluxes, and (2) quantitative analysis for spatial data with a recent interest in urban (fractal) morphologies and big data analyses. She is member of the editorial board and referee for several  scientific international journals in geography and spatial economics.