Project leaders
Prof. dr. Mark De Ridder, MD
Head of Translational Radiation Oncology and Physics (TROP @VUB)
Mark De Ridder graduated at the medical school of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) with maxima cum lauda in 1998. He combined his training in Radiotherapy and Oncology with a doctoral fellowship (FWO-Vlaanderen) and defended his PhD “Hypoxic tumor cell radiosensitization through nitric oxide synthase: role of the NF-kB signalling pathway” in 2005. He was nominated professor of Oncology and Cancer Biology at the VUB in 2008 and head of the Radiotherapy department of the UZ Brussel in 2010. Mark De Ridder is the coordinator of the Spearhead Strategic Research Program “Societal Benefit of Markerless Stereotactic Body Radiotherapy: a Statistical Support based on Quantitative Imaging”.
Contact:
- Phone: +32 2 477 61 44
- Email: mark.deridder@uzbrussel.be
- Location: UZ Brussel, department of radiotherapy
Postdoctoral staff of TROP:
- Prof. dr. Thierry Gevaert
- Dr. Ines Dufait
- Dr. Chaimae El Aisati
- Dr. Sven Van Laere
Prof. dr. Kurt Barbé
Head of Support for Quantitative and Qualitative Research (SQUARE @VUB)
Kurt Barbé received the Master degree in Mathematics and the PhD degree in (medical) instrumentation engineering from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Brussels, Belgium, in 2005 and 2009 respectively. Presently, he is a professor at the VUB at the faculty of Medicine. He is furthermore a co-founder of the research group Digital Mathematics (DIMA) holding a strong expertise in applied mathematics for engineering sciences and beyond. At VUB, he is the founder and coordinator of the interfaculty centre for data-processing and statistics, which later on was renamed to support for quantitative and qualitative research, providing statistical and methodological support to the university community at large. He is further very involved in teaching, being responsible for 8 courses: at master’s level three advanced statistics courses, one course on scientific computing and one course on harmonic analysis; while at undergraduate level, he teaches two courses on biostatistics and a calculus course.
Prof. dr. Barbé is a former research fellow of the Flemish Research Foundation (FWO) and VUB-coordinator of FLAMES – the Flemish inter-university training network on research methodology and statistics. His current research interest is in the field of mathematical modelling and computational statistics applied to biomedicine. Dr. Barbé has served as an Associate Editor since 2010 and Associate Editor in Chief in 2018-2019 where he currently holds the position of Senior Area editor for the domain of Medical, biomedical and healthcare instrumentation and measurement for the IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement. Since 2017, he has served as secretary of the royal Belgian statistical society and since 2021 he is member of the administrative board of the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society. Finally, for the period 2019-2021, he has joined the editorial board for the journal Fractal and Fractional as well as the journal Sensors.
He was a recipient of the Outstanding Young Engineer Award from the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society in 2011 and the Andi Chi Best Paper Award of the IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement in 2013. Two PhD students received the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Graduate Fellowship award acknowledging top research in the scientific domain under his supervision in 2012 and 2017.
Contact:
- Phone: +32 2 477 47 24
- Email: kurt.barbe@vub.be
- Location: Brussels Health Campus – Building F, Office 045.
Prof. dr. Koen Putman
Head of (ICHER @VUB)
Koen Putman is associate professor and chair of the Interuniversity Centre for Health Economics Research (I-CHER) at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He holds the following degrees: MSc in Physiotherapy and Motor rehabilitation (KULeuven, 1993), Specialised postgraduate degree in Neurorehabilitation (KULeuven, 1994), MSc in Social health Sciences (VUB, 1998) Postgraduate degree in Management (VUB, 1999), PhD in social Health Sciences (VUB, 2006) and an MSc in Health Technology Assessment (University of York, UK, 2017). He was a Fulbright Scholar and BAEF Fellow at the National Rehabilitation Hospital (Washington DC) and was a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham and the University of Central Lancashire. End 2008, he became part of the faculty staff at the VUB. His areas of expertise are health services research, health economics and international comparative research.
Contact:
- Phone: +32 2 477 47 40
- Email: koen.putman@vub.be
- Location: Brussels Health Campus – Building K
Prof. dr. Johan de Mey, MD
Head of Radiology (Radiology @UZBrussel)
Johan de Mey received the Medical Doctor’s degree from Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Pleinlaan, Elsene, Belgium, in 1987, and the Ph.D. degree in medical sciences from VUB, in 2005.,He is currently a Professor of Anatomy and Radiology at the Faculty of Medicine, VUB. He is the Head of the Department of Radiology, University Hospital of VUB (UZ Brussels). He is especially interested in interventional radiology and in the processing and analyzing of medical images. His research interests include medical imaging on magnetic resonance, computed tomography, X-ray, and ultrasound.
Contact:
- Phone: +32 2 477 38 87
- Email: johan.demey@uzbrussel.be
- Location: UZ Brussel, department of radiology
Postdoctoral staff
Dr. Ines Dufait
Biologist and postdoctoral researcher TROP
Education:
- Master Biomedical sciences – Great distinction – 2013 – VUB
- PhD in Medical sciences – 2018 – VUB
Expertise:
- Radiobiology
- Cancer metabolism
- Immunotherapy
Prof. dr. Thierry Gevaert
Coordinator of medical physics TROP
Education:
- PhD in medical science at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB)
- Expert recognition from the federal agency (FANC) in the field of medical physics, jurisdiction of radiotherapy
- Master-after-Master in Biomedical and Clinical Engineering, magna cum laude, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB)
- Master in Science (MSc) in Medical Nuclear Techniques, cum laude, XIOS High school Limburg
Expertise:
- Professor of Radiation Oncology
- Medical physicist expert (MPE) in radiotherapy
- Novalis accreditation auditor
Dr. Gevaert T. graduated as medical physicist at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and defended his PhD “Clinical implementation of frameless radiosurgery” in 2012. In 2016, he was nominated professor at the VUB and became the coordinator of the Medical Physics at the UZ Brussel (UZB). His appointment in the Department of Radiotherapy involves research, teaching and clinical practice. Dr. Gevaert is a board certified in Therapeutic Physics and is engaged in mentoring medical physics for graduate students, residents and medical engineers. Dr. Gevaert’s research and clinical interests include stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS), stereotactic body radiotherapy (SBRT), motion management, the development of high-tech radiation techniques, image-guided radiotherapy (IGRT), all with an emphasis on clinical implementation of translational research. Thierry has made numerous international and national presentations, published over 50 peer-reviewed papers. Since 2015, Dr Gevaert is also an auditor for the Novalis Certification program.
Dr. Chaimae El Aisati
Physicist TROP
Education:
- MSc. in Physics (June 2013, Université Libre de Bruxelles)
- PhD in Physics ( February 2018, Université Libre de Bruxelles)
Prizes:
- Inter-University Robert Brout Prize (2013)
Expertise:
- Medical Physics,
- High-energy Physics,
- Particle Physics,
- Dark Matter Physics
Dr. Sven Van Laere
Informatician and biostatistician TROP
Education:
- Master of Science in Engineering: Computer Science – 2013 – VUB
- Master of Statistical Data Analysis – 2019 – UGent
- PhD in Medical sciences (Medical Informatics) – 2020 – VUB
Expertise:
- Data management
- Medical Informatics
- Biostatistics
- Artificial Intelligence