Walter De Brouwer

Academic

De Brouwer was born in Aalst, Belgium. He earned a Masters degree in linguistics from the University of Ghent and a PhD in Semiotics from Tilburg University. He was a lecturer at the University of Antwerp (UFSIA) and an adjunct professor at the International University of Monaco from 2001-2004. He is an Entrepreneur in Residence with the Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning at Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge since 2004. He sits on the editorial advisory board of the Journal for Chinese Entrepreneurship. De Brouwer is a member of the American Mathematical Society.

Publisher

De Brouwer set up Riverland Publications in 1990 to publish personal computer magazines. In 1994, De Brouwer sold his titles to VNU. He then published the cyberpunk magazine Wave, edited by Michel Bauwens and designed by Niels Shoe Meulman. Wave was a cult Belgian avantgarde magazine that joined Boing-Boing and Mondo 2000 as a bridge between the underground and the world of the future.

Internet

In 1996, De Brouwer was one of the founders of PING, later sold to EUnet. In April 1998, the company was sold to Qwest Communications International, which in turn later merged EUnet in with the ill-fated KPNQwest. In 1999, his electronic employment site Jobscape merged with eight similar sites to make up Stepstone. Stepstone went public with a price tag of £365m on the London Stock Exchange. In 2008, De Brouwer set up OLPC Europe, the European branch of One Laptop per Child.

Research labs

In 1996, De Brouwer set up Starlab. It specialized in blue skies research, deep future research, and BANG (Bits, Atoms, Neurons and Genes) research. Starlab produced generic patents in intelligent clothing, and worked on time travel. One of its spinoffs (spitters.com) was collecting spit for personal genomics typing. The laboratory closed during the dot-com bubble in 2001.

Starlab received media attention as the "lab of the last chance” (CNN); for attracting “the world’s brainest nerds” (The Financial Times); and for being the “Nerd Heaven” (Discovery Channel).

De Brouwer is a board member of Tau Zero Foundation, formerly known as NASA’s Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Program, which has published the state-of-the-art work The Frontiers of Propulsion.

Scanadu

De Brouwer is a co-founder and the CEO of Scanadu, a company located at the NASA Ames Research Park in California. Scanadu is developing consumer health diagnostic devices such as the Scanadu Scout, designed to measure various physiological parameters that include temperature, heart rate, blood oxygenation, respiratory rate, ECG, and diastolic/systolic blood pressure; and Scanaflo, an at-home, full-panel urinalysis testing device designed to give consumers immediate information about their liver health, urinary tract infections, and other vitals.

Scanadu is seeking approval of the device by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) before bringing it to market in 2015 to ensure clinical-grade accuracy. Scanadu has received a number of accolades, such as being named as one of VentureBeat’s 26 Amazing Startups You Need to Watch in 2014. The company is among 10 teams participating in the Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize contest, which seeks to make a real-world version of the Star Trek tricorder.

De Brouwer stepped down from CEO in April 2016.

Other activities

De Brouwer is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and served as President of RSA Europe from 2006 to 2008. He is a member of TED and curator of TEDxBrussels and is a sponsor of Quantified Self Labs. He was a distinguished lecturer at the National Science Foundation in 2013.

De Brouwer’s articles have been published by The Huffington Post, Techonomy, and others. His article, “How the People Are Taking Over the World,” was among Techonomy’s Most-Read Articles of 2014 and was cited by its editors as “perhaps the most philosophical of Techonomy’s top articles” that year.

De Brouwer has two children with his current wife and a daughter from a previous marriage.