Vince Van Thienen (°1989) graduated in Archaeology at Ghent University in 2011. Prior to starting his PhD, he briefly worked at the Flemish Heritage Agency (currently AOE, formerly VIOE) and in commercial archaeology (Gate). In 2012, he started on the FWO-NWO funded "Decline and Fall" project at Ghent University in collaboration with the Free University of Amsterdam (VU).
His PhD research focused on transformations in settlement patterns and changes in material culture in the Late Roman Low Countries and the Late Antique world. As part of his doctoral training, he was a Visiting Training Fellow at the Centre for Late Antique Archaeology at Kent University (UK) in 2013. Additional courses and collaborations in archaeometry resulted in experience with X-Ray Fluorescence spectroscopy (XRF) and Ceramic Petrography to analyze ceramic and metal artefacts.
After obtaining his doctoral degree in 2016, he was granted a Belgian American Educational Foundation (BAEF) to become a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Council on Archaeological Studies at Yale University (USA) in 2016-2017. In the following year (2017-2018), he participated in the Civitas Tungrorum project from the Gallo-Roman Museum in Tongeren as a postdoc at the Historical Archaeology Research Group (HARG) from the UGent Archaeology departement. From December 2018, he was granted a Alexander von Humboldt Stipendiat for a one-year postdoc at the Institut für Archäologische Wissenschaften at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main (DE), researching handmade pottery and the everyday life in Late Antiquity in the Rhein-Main-Gebiet. In december 2019, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies: Migration and Mobility in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages at the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen (DE).
In 2020, he was employed as a teaching assistent in archaeometry and scientific staff at the UGent Archaeology department, while part-time working on the archaeological synthesis project of the city of Ghent, funded by the Flemish Government, on the study and analysis of clay tobacco pipes from Ghent in the early modern and modern period. Since January 2021, he started a three-year postdoc funded by the UGent Special Research Fund (BOF) on the materiality of local communities in the 5th century.