EMC Personality Profile

Johan Catrysse is one of the most active European scientists in the area of EMC. His name appears on nearly every committee roster of European EMC conferences and he is an active member of various standardization and educational committees.
Johan received his diploma 1971 and started his career as a student of electrical engineering at the RU Gent. Then he joined the staff of Professor van Bladel as research assistant at the Laboratory for Electromagnetics at the RU Gent. In 1974, he changed universities and became professor in the electronic department at the Katholike Hogeschool Brugge Oostende (KHBO). In 1983, he was promoted to the position as head of the EMC laboratory. Due to Johan’s leadership, the EMC laboratory became well known as a test house on EMC that provides EMC advisory service, solutions of interference problems, and precompliance testing.
In addition to his management duties, Johan focuses his research activities on PCB and system design under EMC constraints, shielding materials, shielding rooms and related measuring methods. He received the PhD degree from Leeds Metropolitan University for his research on shielding. In addition to lecture courses on circuit theory, automatic control engineering, EMC, radio propagation, antennas and HF circuit design, Johan is involved in international, mainly European, educational programs. Under the frame of the Pan-European M.Sc. on EMC and RF communications, he serves as local coordinator at the KHBO in Oostende and is a past external examiner at the Universities of York (UK) and Hull (UK). Johan has visited the Technical Universities of Prague, Bratislava, Sofia and Chania as a guest professor.
He is very active in several EMC related national and international standardization committees. He has been the convener of the maintenance team MT15 of the standard IEC 61000-1-2 “EMC and Functional Safety”. As a matter of course, he is a member of the IEEE Standards Committee 299 “shielded rooms” and chair of the IEEE Standards Committee 1302 “shielding of gaskets”.
Johan has been active in founding a European Conference on Electromagnetic Compatibility. In 1994, his activities resulted in the establishing of EMC EUROPE. Since then he has served as a member of the international steering committee and in 2000 he was the chair of EMC EUROPE held in Brugge. Due to his outstanding contribution to this conference over the years, he has been elected as chair of the international steering committees of EMC EUROPE.
Johan has been a member of the IEEE Electromagnetic Compatibility Society for decades. He is an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on EMC. He is a founding member and current chair of the IEEE Benelux EMC Chapter.
On the personal side, Johan is married to Magda Brabant and they have three sons. His eldest son, Michael, followed his father and has chosen a career as an electrical engineer. Since 2004, Magda Brabant and Johan have been proud grandparents of Victor, their first grandchild. Johan is committed to the derivation of the cultural heritage of his home region. As part of this dedication, he is chair of the committee that maintains the monument of the Brugge Cathedral.
Johan enjoys classical music, particularly the early music and baroque, as well as late symphonies. In his leisure time he enjoys concerts at the new Brugge Concertgebouw. Besides music, Johan loves modern painting and sculptures. EMC

Johan working in the EMC lab with a TEM cell.

Johan operating a small shielding measuring cell.

Editor’s Note: Dr. Frank Sabath, long an active member of the EMC Society, has recently joined the EMC Newsletter staff in order to contribute to the EMC Personality Profile column. He will seek illustrious EMC Society members outside the US to feature in the Newsletter. This will complement the efforts of Bill Duff, Associate Editor, who will turn his future attention to profiling US based members of the EMC Society. Dr. Sabath’s contact information may be found on page 3 of this Newsletter.