Royal Academy for Overseas Sciences
a Belgian academy of science
The Royal Academy for Overseas Sciences (RAOS; French: Académie royale des sciences d'outre-mer, ARSOM; Dutch: Koninklijke Academie voor Overzeese Wetenschappen, KAOW) is a Belgian federal academy that contributes to the progress of scientific knowledge about overseas regions. It is located in Uccle, Brussels, and is one of Belgium's numerous academies.
History
The academy was founded in 1928 as the Royal Belgian Colonial Institute (Institut royal colonial belge). It was renamed in 1954 as the Royal Academy of Colonial Sciences (Académie royale des sciences coloniales). Its interests were initially restricted to the Belgian colonial empire and particularly the Belgian Congo until decolonisation. In 1959, it was renamed the Royal Academy of Overseas Sciences (Académie royale des sciences d'outre-mer) and broadened its geographical remit to include Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Oceania. The academy organises a wide range of activities, including publications, academic conferences, and annual competitions.
The Royal Academy for Overseas Sciences is divided into three Sections:
Section of Human Sciences
Section of Natural and Medical Sciences
Section of Technical Sciences
Competitions, scholarships and prizes
The Academy organizes yearly competitions with specific topics for each of its three Sections. Scholarships are also granted every year as part of the Floribert Jurion Fund, which aim is to contribute to the training of future agricultural engineers or veterinary surgeons by giving them the opportunity to go for a training period in a developing country.
Finally the Academy awards the following three-year prizes:
The Lucien Cahen Prize for Geology (2012).
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2370051. VIAF identifies the subject as 125155530. The Library of Congress control number is n50069467. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1928, 1954, 1959 and 2012.
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This entry incorporates text from “Royal Academy for Overseas Sciences” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.