He did his PhD research at the University of Leuven, Belgium, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, USA. He took up an academic position at the Applied Mathematics department of the University of Waterloo (Canada) in 2004, after post-doctoral positions at the von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics in Belgium, and in Tom Manteuffel's and Steve McCormick's Multilevel Computation group at the Department of Applied Mathematics of the University of Colorado at Boulder. Between 2015 and 2018, he worked at the School of Mathematical Sciences of Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

(2) Data science: social network analysis, social media, tensor decomposition, algorithms for distributed big data analytics, cloud computing, recommendation, Markov chain Monte Carlo methods, computational social science, health science.

Prof. De Sterck is always interested in exploring new interdisciplinary collaborations with application specialists in science, engineering and technology. His group contributes fast, accurate and scalable computational methods to these collaborations.

Professional activities:
Prof. De Sterck is a member of the senior editorial team of the SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing, serving as the section editor for the "Methods and Algorithms for Scientific Computing" section. He is currently serving as the Vice Chair of the SIAM activity group on Data Mining and Analytics (SIAG DMA) (2018-2019), and previously served as Chair of the SIAM activity group on Computational Science and Engineering (SIAG CSE) (2017-2018). He co-chaired the 2015 SIAM conference on Computational Science and Engineering, which, with 1700 attendees, was the largest SIAM conference to that date.