Sonny Achten received a Master of Civil Engineering degree in 2014 from KU Leuven and returned to obtain a Master of Artificial Intelligence degree in 2021. Subsequently, Sonny remained at KU Leuven to join the STADIUS research group, pursuing a Ph.D in Machine Learning under the supervision of prof. Johan Suykens. His research focuses on deep learning and graph neural networks on the one hand, and kernel methods and duality on the other. Finding synergies between those fields with a theoretical mindset is his main research interest, as well as applying these models to real-life problems such as in quantitative finance.