He graduated from the University of Louvain (UCLouvain) with a MSc Physics degree in 1966, a PhD in 1969, then his Agrégé de l'Enseignement Supérieur in 1972.
[4] He has served on various advisory committees, including those for the SNO, Telescope Array and Auger-upgrade experiments, the Max Planck Institutes in Heidelberg and Munich, the ICRR at the University of Tokyo, the US Particle Physics Prioritization Panel and the ApPEC particle astrophysics advisory panel in Europe.
This pilot experiment proved successful, however their results were marred by interference from cosmic rays as well as air bubbles in the ice.
In 2005 his team started construction of the IceCube project, designed to be 100 times bigger than AMANDA, with a total size of 1 km3 and buried up to a mile and a half deep.
The most important result from the IceCube was the clear break-through observation of high-energy neutrinos (about 100 times more energetic than the particles accelerated today in the world's most powerful machine, the LHC at CERN) in 2013, from as yet not identified sources outside the Galaxy.