Elisabeth De Waele MD, PhD

Professor Elisabeth De Waele received her medical degree with great distinction from Vrije Universiteit Brussel in 2004. She subsequently completed postgraduate training in general surgery in 2010 and became a certified Intensive Care Physician in 2012. She is currently head of clinics in the ICU, responsible for the postoperative treatment of cardiac surgery patients, and acts as the liaison with the surgical teams of the Universitair Ziekenhuis Brussel. Since 2012 she is president of the Nutrition Team at Vrije Universiteit Brussel/Universitair Ziekenhuis Brussel. The multidisciplinary team realized hospital-wide a higher quality of care concerning nutrition: standardized nutritional screening at admission, protocol-guided nutritional therapy on the ward and in ICU, quality improvement of nutritional therapy in the Hemodialysis population, data gathering and benchmarking, etc.

Her scientific work is focused on clinical research in critically ill patients and resulted in a Ph.D. Thesis entitled “Energy Expenditure and Nutritional Therapy in Critically ill Patients” in 2015. The research group of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel/Universitair Ziekenhuis Brussel (Brussels Health Campus) is renowned in different domains of clinical research. The domains of expertise comprise nutrition in critical care settings, metabolism and nutrition of ICU and cardiac surgery patients, and nutrition in oncology. Professor De Waele acts as a promotor and co-promotor for several doctorates, and as a clinical tutor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel for medical students, pharmacists, and dieticians in formation. She has published more than sixty articles in peer-reviewed journals, including 6 as the first author.