Andre Vits, former EC

Married to Marie-Josée Van Geertruyden and has 3 children Werner, Jeroen and Severien.

Graduated in1968 as Electro-Mechanical. 

In 1978 he got his PhD and was appointed lecturer at the KULeuven (B).

Main topics of research: traffic control, image processing, near accident analysis, automatic incident detection. He was board member of a non-profit organisation (Langzaam Verkeer) promoting safe road design.

In 1988, he joined the European Commission to prepare the DRIVE programme. From project officer (navigation systems, freight and fleet management etc.), he moved to the staff unit for programme coordination and Finance and Budgeting.

Late 2000, he was nominated Head of Unit and has led the ICT for Transport activities for the last 7 years, before taking retirement on 1 January 2009. During this period (FP6 and FP7), focus of the programme activities have been the development of ICT based safety systems, i.e. ADAS, and the support of the eSafety initiative, as chair of the eSafety Forum Steering Group.

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