Promoting science to the benefit of practice: A professional biography of Walter Hellinckx

Abstract

Professor Walter Hellinckx has been the founder of the European Scientific Association on Residential and Foster Care for children and adolescents (EUSARF) and the association’s president for about fifteen years. In September 2007, he left the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, after a long and outstanding academic career. To honor him, the EUSARF members offered him a Festschrift (see Book announcement in this issue). This Festschrift is a ‘state of the art’ of the knowledge of the care for vulnerable children and families, a study field where Walter for a lot of years has been very active and in which he brought together both national and foreign colleagues. In this paper, which is a reprint of the first chapter of the Festschrift, we would like to give an evocation of his academic career.