Frieda Steurs studied Germanic philology, neurolinguistics and computational linguistics at the KU Leuven, and obtained her doctorate in general linguistics at the same university.
She is professor emeritus at the KU Leuven, Faculty of Arts, Antwerp campus and was campus dean until 2015. She conducts research in the field of computer assisted translation, terminology management and multilingual document management and is a member of the research group QLVL. She has been the director and scientific director of the Dutch Language Institute (INT) since 2016. She is responsible for the multi-annual policy plans, manages the institute and ensures that its scientific activities are streamlined. In this capacity, she organised the Lorentz workshop (November 2019) ‘On the future of academic lexicography. Linguistic Knowledge Codification in the Era of Big Data & AI’. She is the INT’s representative in EFNIL, the European Federation of National Institutes of Language and is a member of the Termraad of the Dutch language department of the European Institutions.
Frieda Steurs is active internationally as a research fellow at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa, and she was an associate professor at the Université Catholique de L’Ouest in Angers, France, for many years. Additionally, she was the president of TermNet, an international terminology network founded by UNESCO, until 2019 and she has been the Secretary-General of CIPL (Permanent International Committee of Linguists) since 2018.
In 2022, she was awarded the Simon Stevinpenning for her contributions to the field of terminology.