Tom Van Cutsem is a professor with the DistriNet research group at KU Leuven.

Tom's research interests lie broadly in secure distributed computing, at the intersection of distributed systems and programming languages. Most recently, Tom's research focuses on the study of decentralized systems, blockchains and smart contract platforms, both from a language engineering perspective (designing safer languages to write smart contracts) as well as from a middleware engineering perspective (improving the APIs of blockchain platforms).

Prior to joining DistriNet, Tom spent significant time in industry. In past work and roles Tom has worked on Web standards (JavaScript), reflection and modularity in object-oriented languages, mobile and ubiquitous computing, distributed stream processing, concurrent and parallel programming (actor languages, reactive and event-based systems) and AI pair programming tools (machine learning on code).