Tom Hauffman

Tom Hauffman has been part of the SURF group since 2006. He obtained his PhD in engineering sciences in 2012. Hereafter, he had a postdoctoral position, with a part time assignement at the Technical Unversity of Eindhoven. Since 2016, Tom is a part time professor in the Faculty of engineering at VUB. He is teaching the course of Surface Analysis to the students of materials engineering in the BRUFACE program (VUB and ULB). Furthermore, he is responsible for the interactive workshops in materials science for the bachelor students in engineering. In the faculty, Tom is member of the facultary PhD commision and educational board of materials and chemistry.

Since 2021, Tom became Scientific Director of the core facility “Materials Characterization” at VUB. Here, he is responsible for the exploitation of an unique analytical platform, that allows the characterization of all types of material classes from the macro- to the nanoscale, from surfaces to bulk, including chemical, structural and morphological identification.

Tom's research focus is on hybrid interfaces between nanotuned metal oxides and organic overlayers. As such, he is promotor of several PhD students, working on the molecular understanding of the interaction between organic coatings and metal oxides. In this context, he is exploring novel surface analysis techniques, going beyond traditional vacuum equipment. For that reason, a lot of effort is put in the characterisation of interfaces by Near Ambient Pressure XPS and Nano Infrared Spectroscopy.

Tom organises every year an international doctoral school: "Corrosion: from analysis to modelling", attracting every year a vast amount of early years international PhD students and industrial researchers. He is also involved in the organisation of several international symposia and workshops (EMNT 2016, chairman EFNS 2017,...) and international reviewer for European projects (M-ERANET,...).