Rate My Professor Jeroen van der Laak

Jeroen van der Laak is Professor of Computational Pathology and principal investigator at the Department of Pathology of Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He holds an MSc in Computer Science and obtained his PhD from Radboud University in 2001 with a thesis entitled ‘Automated identification of cell and tissue components in pathology’. Following his doctorate, he has remained at Radboudumc, where he built and leads a research group of approximately 25 members specializing in the development and validation of artificial intelligence for analyzing tissue sections.

His research centers on deep learning-based whole-slide image analysis to enhance routine pathology diagnostics, enable objective quantification of immunohistochemical markers, and explore novel imaging biomarkers for prognostics. Key applications include diagnostics for breast, prostate, and colon cancers, detection of lymph node metastases, and evaluation of biopsies from transplanted kidneys, where AI systems match or exceed human pathologists in accuracy, efficiency, and consistency while extracting subtle features invisible to the human eye. Van der Laak coordinates the Bigpicture consortium, a €70 million EU-funded project establishing the world's largest public dataset of digital pathology images. He has co-authored over 160 peer-reviewed publications and is a member of the editorial boards of Modern Pathology, Laboratory Investigation, and the Journal of Pathology Informatics. In prominent leadership positions, he chairs the Task Force ‘AI in Pathology’ of the European Society of Pathology, serves on the board of directors of the Digital Pathology Association, organizes the Computational Pathology Symposium at the European Congress of Pathology, and coordinated the CAMELYON grand challenges in 2016 and 2017. He delivered the prestigious USCAP Nathan Kaufman Lecture in 2019, secured grants from the European Union and Dutch Cancer Society, and holds roles as Chief Scientific Officer at Radboudumc spin-off Aiosyn and visiting professor at Linköping University’s Center for Medical Image Science and Visualization since 2018.