Karolien De Bruyne is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business at KU Leuven in Belgium and Associate Professor Extraordinary at the Department of Industrial Engineering at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. Her research focuses on location decisions of firms, industrial policy with a focus on global value chains, international trade and labour economics. She holds a PhD in Economics from KU Leuven for which she was granted a PhD Fellowship from the Research Foundation Flanders. In 2020-2021, she received VLIR-UOS funding for a 2 year South Initiative project on ‘Improving Industrial Policy Intervention in South Africa’ together with Stellenbosch University and Cape Peninsula University of Technology. With this interdisciplinary project she aims to contribute to the lack of tools to support efficient industrial policy-making. In 2020, part of her jointly developed new Input-Output Product Space Methodology Framework was integrated in the Industrial Analytics Platform of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization.