Short biography: Pieter Jan Jordaens joined Sirris (the Belgian collective technology center – www.sirris.be ) in 2010 in the role of project leader to manage the Offshore Wind Infrastructure (OWI) project lead by Sirris, VUB and a group of Belgian companies active in the early days of offshore wind power. Since then he has been responsible to initiate, set-up and roll-out the operations of the (offshore) wind energy RD&I department at Sirris and it’s supporting services in different roles (project engineer, senior engineer, business developer, cluster manager). Pieter Jan also acts as operating officer of OWI-Lab (www.owi-lab.be), a joint collaboration between Sirris, VUB and UGent to support (offshore) wind RD&I activities in Belgium. During the past years PJ has set-up the large climatic test facility for wind turbine components in Antwerp, supported the structural health monitoring (SHM) RD&I trajectory of OWI-Lab in partnership with VUB, and together with UGent managed the IBN Offshore Energy Cluster as cluster manager in which between 2007-2020 more than 40 large RD&I projects linked to offshore wind energy were set-up with industry. Pieter Jan now acts as Program manager Energy Transition within Sirris. Before joining Sirris, Pieter Jan obtained a Master’s degree in Electro-Mechanical Engineering at KU Leuven. He also joined the International Postgraduate Programme in Entrepreneurial Engineering after
his Master. PJ is also the president of Technovation Hub vzw, a platform initiating and supporting hi-tech engineering student projects. PJ is also board member of Seacoop cvba, a cooperative venture that will co-develop the upcoming 3.5GW Princess Elisabeth offshore wind zone in Belgium in which participation of Belgian citizens will be supported.
