Rate My Professor Celine Vens

Celine Vens is a professor in the Faculty of Medicine at KU Leuven's Kulak campus in Kortrijk, Belgium, where she joined as assistant professor in 2014, was promoted to associate professor in 2019, and became full professor in 2023. She obtained her PhD in Computer Science from KU Leuven in 2007 after conducting predoctoral research at the DTAI Laboratory in the Department of Computer Science. Her postdoctoral career, supported by a fellowship from the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) from 2009 to 2014, included positions at KU Leuven's DTAI Lab, the Plant-Nematode Interactions Lab at INRA in Sophia-Antipolis, France, and the Lambrecht Lab in the Inflammation Research Center at VIB and Ghent University. Currently, she heads the Subdivision of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence within the itec Division, serves as a principal investigator in the Data Driven Healthcare research group of Biomedical Sciences and the ITEC research group on personalized digital solutions, and is a member of the Leuven.AI Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Vens teaches biostatistics, bioinformatics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence in clinical practice to students in medicine, biomedical sciences, statistics and data science, and AI programs.

Her research centers on developing machine learning algorithms for biomedicine and healthcare applications, including predictive models for clinical decision support, multi-output learning such as multi-label, multi-target, and hierarchical prediction, tree-based ensemble learning, explainable models, survival analysis, interaction prediction, and recommender systems. Key publications include "Decision Trees for Hierarchical Multi-label Classification" (Machine Learning, 2008), "Predicting Human Olfactory Perception from Chemical Features of Odor Molecules" (Science, 2017), "Tree Ensembles for Predicting Structured Outputs" (Pattern Recognition, 2013), "Predicting Gene Function Using Hierarchical Multi-label Decision Tree Ensembles" (BMC Bioinformatics, 2010), and "Drug-target Interaction Prediction with Tree-ensemble Learning and Output Space Reconstruction" (BMC Bioinformatics, 2020). She holds editorial roles as Action Editor for Machine Learning journal and board member for Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery and Artificial Intelligence in Medicine journals. Vens co-chaired the ECML-PKDD 2017 conference, chaired Benelearn 2016, and participates in program committees of international conferences. Her team achieved first place in the 2024 DREAM Olfactory Mixtures Prediction Challenge and secured FWO projects and mandates.