Frank Vermeulen obtained his Master (1981) and PhD (1988) degrees in Archaeology at Ghent University, where he was also research assistant between 1981 and 1989. His doctoral dissertation concerned an archaeological study of the Romanization of Sandy Flanders. After a few years of being first research assistant and later research director at the National Fund for Scientific Research in Belgium (1989-1999) he became lecturer at the Department of Archaeology of Ghent University (1989).
Since 1994 he is Associate Professor and from 2008 onwards Full professor of Roman archaeology and archaeological methodology at this University. Between 2015 and 2019 he was also Chair of the Department of Archaeology at Ghent University. Between 2006 and 2020 he also held temporary academic appointments as: part-time Research Professor at the University of Évora (Portugal), and as Visiting professor at Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia), UC Berkeley (San Francisco, USA), Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris, France), Università del Salento (Italy) and Università di Bologna (Italy) .
In his research two major themes dominate: the archaeology and geo-archaeology of ancient Mediterranean landscapes and Roman rural and urban settlement history. He has a special interest in developing and using non-destructive survey techniques, such as aerial photography and geophysical prospection. Since 2000 he directed field projects in western Mediterranean countries, in particular in Italy (in the regions Marche and Lazio), Corsica and Portugal. Authored and co-authored books include: Excavations in Pessinus: the so-called Acropolis. From Hellenistic and Roman cemetery to Byzantine Castle (2003), From the Mountains to the Sea. The Roman Colonisation and Urbanisation of Central-Adriatic Italy (2017), The Potenza Valley Survey (Marche, Italy) . Settlement Dynamics and Changing Material Culture in an Adriatic Valley between Iron Age and Late Antiquity (2017). Influential co-edited books include: Geo-archaeology of the Landscapes of Classical Antiquity (2000), Ancient Lines in the Landscape. A Geo-archaeological Study of Protohistoric and Roman Roads and Field Systems in Northwestern Gaul (2001), Thinking about space. The potential of surface survey and contextual analysis in the definition of space in Roman times, (2008), Ol’Man River. Geo-archaeological aspects of rivers and river plains (2009), Changing Landscapes. The impact of Roman towns on the Landscape of the Western Mediterranean (2010) , Urban Landscape Survey in Italy and the Mediterranean (2012), Ammaia I: The Survey. A Romano-Lusitanian townscape revealed (2013), Good practice in archaeological diagnostics. Non-invasive survey of complex archaeological sites (2013), Picenum and the Ager Gallicus at the Dawn of the Roman Conquest (2020) and Space, Movement and the Economy in Roman Italy and Beyond (2021) . Around 220 papers in international journals complete his scientific publications.
