Ghent University alumni

Luc Van den Bossche (born 16 September 1947, in Aalst, Belgium) is a Belgian socialist politician and father of Freya Van den Bossche.He graduated as a doctor in law at the University of Ghent in 1970. Luc Van den Bossche was a Member of Parliament for a number of years and cabinet member in several federal and regional governments in Belgium. Currently he is chairman of the Brussels International Airport Company and of the Associatie UGent, as well as board member in several companies. He is a member of the advisory board of the Itinera Institute think-tank.

Pierre Antoine Marie Chevalier (born 8 October 1952) is a Belgian politician and member of the Open Vlaamse Liberalen en Democraten (VLD). He is a former Secretary of State in the Belgian Federal Government and was elected to the Belgian Senate in 2003 by the Dutch electoral college. He studied Laws and Criminology at the University of Ghent before he became a lawyer. He became involved in politics early on, first as a Trotskyist, as a socialist later on, and since 1992 as a liberal. In October 2000, he was forced to resign as Secretary of State by Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt, who is also a member of the VLD, after it became public that he had been named in a criminal investigation in Switzerland.

Wim Mertens (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈʋɪˈmɛrtə(n)s]; born 14 May 1953) is a Flemish Belgian composer, countertenor vocalist, pianist, guitarist, and musicologist.

François Laurent (8 July 1810 – 11 February 1887) was a Belgian historian and jurisconsult.

Désiré Charles Emanuel van Monckhoven (1834–1882) was a Belgian chemist, physicist, and photographic researcher. He was also an inventor and author.

Maurits Sabbe, born Maurice Charles Marie Guillaume Sabbe (Bruges, 9 February 1873 – Antwerp, 12 February 1938), was a Flemish man of letters and educator who became curator of the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp.

Marcel Gilles Jozef Minnaert (12 February 1893 – 26 October 1970) was a Belgian-Dutch astronomer. He was born in Bruges and died in Utrecht. He is notable for his contributions to astronomy and physics and for a popular book on meteorological optics: Light and colour in the open air, first published in English in 1940.

Gerard Alfons August, Baron Mortier (25 November 1943 – 8 March 2014) was a Belgian opera director and administrator of Flemish origin.

Franz Hellens, born Frédéric van Ermengem (8 September 1881, in Brussels – 20 January 1972, in Brussels) was a prolific Belgian novelist, poet and critic. Although of Flemish descent, he wrote entirely in French, and lived in Paris from 1947 to 1971. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times.He is known as one of the major figures in Belgian magic realism (fantastique quotidien), and as the indefatigable editor of Signaux de France et de Belgique (later Le Disque vert). The only work translated into English is Mémoires d'Elseneur ("Memoirs from Elsinore", 1954).
His father, Émile van Ermengem, was the bacteriologist who discovered the cause of botulism. His younger brother was the writer François Maret (Frans van Ermengem).

Luíz Cruls or Luís Cruls or Louis Ferdinand Cruls (21 January 1848 – 21 June 1908) was a Belgian-Brazilian astronomer and geodesist. He was Director of the Brazilian National Observatory from 1881 to 1908, led the commission charged with the survey and selection of a future site for the capital of Brazil in the Central Plateau, and was co-discoverer of the Great Comet of 1882. Cruls was also an active proponent of efforts to accurately measure solar parallax and towards that end led a Brazilian team in their observations of 1882 Transit of Venus in Punta Arenas, Chile.