Roel Sterckx FBA (born 1969) is a Flemish-British sinologist and anthropologist. He is the Joseph Needham Professor of Chinese History, Science, and Civilization at Cambridge University, and a fellow of Clare College.

Life and career

Sterckx grew up in Retie, Belgium, and attended secondary school at the Sint-Jan Berchmanscollege in Mol. He read sinology at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (1991). He went on to study Chinese philosophy at National Taiwan University before moving to Cambridge (Clare Hall), where he obtained a Ph.D. in Oriental studies (1997). He was a research fellow at Oxford (Wolfson College) and taught at the University of Arizona before returning to Cambridge in 2002. He served as Secretary-General of the European Association for Chinese Studies from 2006 to 2012, and has been a long-serving trustee of the Needham Research Institute. In 2013 he was elected Fellow of the British Academy.

Selected works