Erik Dick was born on December 10, 1950, in Torhout, Belgium. He obtained a M.Sc. in electromechanical engineering from Ghent University in 1973 and a Ph.D. in computational fluid dynamics in 1980. From 1973, he worked as researcher and became full professor of mechanical engineering at Ghent University in 1995, where he taught turbomachines and computational fluid dynamics. He retired in September 2014 and is now part-time individual senior researcher, combined with retirement. His area of research is computational methods and turbulence and transition models for flow problems in mechanical engineering. He received the 1990 Iwan Akerman Award for fluid machinery of the Belgian National Science Foundation.