He currently leads a research group of about 15 people with interests in semi-automatic hardware design methodologies and tools, spiking neural networks and reservoir computing, scalable hardware and applications and reconfigurable multiprocessor networks. Dirk Stroobandt is a member of AIG (Alumni Ghent), KVIV (Royal Flamish Engineering Association), IEEE, and ACM. Dirk Stroobandt is the inaugural winner of the ACM/SIGDA Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award in Design Automation, presented to him at the Design Automation Conference (DAC'99) in New Orleans, Louisiana, June 1999. He also received the `Scientific prize Alcatel Bell' for his work on "Structural and behavioural aspects of short optical interconnects in electronic systems" in 2002.