Carla M. L. Van Herpen MD, PhD

Van Herpen is the first Professor of Rare Cancers in the Netherlands. She will work to improve survival rate and quality of life for patients with rare cancers, paying special attention to salivary gland cancer and head and neck cancer. Rare cancers are characterized by poorer survival rates than more frequently observed cancers because there is often a delay in making the correct diagnosis, fewer adequate therapies are available, and fewer clinical trials are being set up for them.

Carla van Herpen earned her doctor’s qualification from Radboud University in 1989. She then completed the internal medicine program at Canisius-Wilhelmina Hospital and Radboud university medical center and did her follow-up training to become an internist-oncologist at Radboud university medical center. She has been a staff member in the Medical Oncology Department at Radboud university medical center since 1997. In 2004, she earned her PhD from Radboud University with her dissertation: ‘Intratumoral administration of interleukin-12 in head and neck cancer’. In 2015-2016, she completed an executive course, Managing Health Care Delivery, at Harvard Business School in Boston, Massachusetts (USA).