Inge Derom

Inge Derom is a professor at the department of Movement and Sport Sciences in the Faculty of Physical Education and Physiotherapy at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. She earned a Master’s degree in Physical Education (elective sport management) from the KU Leuven in 2007. Following her education in Belgium, Inge moved to Windsor (Canada) to complete an additional Master’s degree in the Faculty of Human Kinetics under the supervision of prof. dr. Marijke Taks. During her program in Windsor from 2007 until 2009, she successfully defended her thesis on the social impact of the 2008 Canadian Transplant Games. In 2009, she started her doctoral program in the School of Human Kinetics at the University of British Columbia (Canada). Under the supervision of prof. dr. Robert VanWynsberghe, Inge focused her research to uncover the theoretical connections between event leveraging, sport participation and health  promotion through the case of the Tour of Flanders (an international, world-class cycling event). She participated in the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games Impact (OGI) Study, focusing on the social impact of the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games on (social) public policies at the regional, provincial and national level. In 2019, she conducted a study for the agency Visit Brussels to examine the social impact of the 2019 Tour de France Grand Départ on residents of the Brussels Capital Region. She has a keen interest in understanding the social impact of major sport events for the host community and event participants. 

Inge is a member of the education council Movement and Sport Sciences and she is responsible for coordinating the sport policy and sport management elective at the graduate level. Inge is also a member of the internationalization committee in the Faculty of Physical Education and Physiotherapy where she has a keen interest in creating opportunities for student mobility (e.g. group mobility sport management to Canada in 2016 and group mobility movement and sport sciences to South Africa in 2019). Inge teaches various courses in sport management, sport marketing, entrepreneurship and financial management at the undergraduate and graduate level. Inge supervises Master students in topics such as corporate social responsibility in professional football and competencies and careers of sport management alumni.  

Inge is involved in three Erasmus+ Sport projects (collaborative partnerships): 

• The MONITOR project (2019-2020), coordinated by the VUB aims to develop a user-friendly manual that will help sports-based organizations to increase the level of employability of the young people they work with and work in a more efficient and effective way for delivering their programmes; 

• The GETZ project (2018-2020), coordinated by the University Of Worcester aims to educate generation Z via a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) to become change agents and leaders in sport who can breakdown stereotypes and barriers for future generations; 

• The SPPF project (2020-2022), coordinated by the Rode Antraciet (NGO) aims to identify areas for advancing active citizenship within the prison system by offering insights into the good practices an learning areas in five European countries (i.e., Belgium, Croatia, Italy, The Netherlands, and the United Kingdom)