Ghent University is a top 100 university and one of the major universities in Belgium. Its 11 faculties offer more than 200 courses and conduct in-depth research within a wide range of scientific domains. Ghent University Global Campus is also the first European university in Songdo, South Korea.

BLUEGent is Ghent University’s business development center in the field of Aquaculture and Blue Life Sciences and is one of world’s leading research partners in these domains. BLUEGent offers top expertise and advanced equipment for analyses, scientific and business advice. It groups 35 professors and over 400 scientists of Ghent University to lead the way in blue tourism & health, coastal management, healthy oceans, marine resources & bioprospecting, multi-use of marine space, and sustainable seafood.

BLUEGent specializes in bringing new technologies, products and other research findings to the market in the Blue Economy. This can be under different formats: spin-offs, licenses, public-private partnerships and so on. BLUEGent actively invests in its relations with partners and functions as a direct interface between its members and the industry, governments and social organizations. It identifies and initiates multidisciplinary research projects that can benefit the industry and/or society. BLUEGent actively monitors new research findings with economic potential and matures them to market readiness. It provides interdisciplinary scientific and technological expertise, collaborative research, training, innovations and financing options for R&D to its partners.

Dr. ir. Margriet Drouillon, MBA acts as Chief Business Officer for the BLUEGent consortium. She oversees the commercialization of new research findings to marketable technologies and products in close collaboration with faculty members and senior researchers. This involves i.a.: managing the portfolio of collaborations between academic and industrial partners, building a strategic patent portfolio, and setting out priorities and securing funding for application- and commercialization-based R&D. Dr. ir. Margriet Drouillon, MBA engineered several strategic alliances, research collaborations and licensing deals with industrial partners. She was, for instance, the driving force of the first offshore mussel culture project in operational wind farms in the North Sea, by bringing together all project partners and shaping the partnership, in terms of content as well as funding and legal set-up.

Dr. ir. Margriet Drouillon, MBA was also actively involved in the pre-seed and startup phases of several spin-off companies of Ghent University, such as IMAQUA bvba (a company that provides contract research services in shrimp health) and KYTOS bv (a spin-off that commercializes microbiome management solutions by fingerprinting microbiomes).