Emile Van Schaftingen studied medicine at the Université catholique de Louvain, where he graduated in 1978. While still a student, he joined the laboratory headed by Henri-Géry Hers at the ICP, where he was trained by Louis Hue. With H.G. Hers and L. Hue, he discovered fructose 2,6-bisphosphate, which became the subject of his thesis. After a post-doctoral stay in 1986-1987 in the laboratory of Benoît de Crombrugghe at the NIH, he came back to ICP to head his own research group. Since then, his work has been mostly devoted to the regulation of glucokinase by a regulatory protein, to glucose-6-phosphatase, to the identification of enzyme deficiencies in inborn errors of metabolism, and recently to fructosamine-3-kinase, an enzyme involved in protein repair.