Johan Verbraecken MD, PhD

Prof. Dr. Johan Verbraecken is the medical coordinator of the Multidisciplinary Sleep Center of the University Hospital of Antwerp (UZA). He has been active in the field of sleep since 1990 and conducted two years of full-time scientific research at the UZA sleep center, which was completed with a thesis entitled “Mechanisms of unstable breathing during sleep in adults”. In 1998 he obtained recognition as a pulmonologist and between 1998 and 2001 he worked at the Academic Hospital Maastricht and in the Center for Sleep Medicine Kempenhaeghe in Heeze (Netherlands). In 2001 he joined the UZA lung diseases staff. He is currently an associate professor at the University of Antwerp.

Within Europe, he was successively secretary and chairman of the Sleep working group of the European Respiratory Society, a board member of the European Sleep Research Society, and an advisory member of the Assembly of National Sleep Societies. On a national level, he was president of the Belgian Association for Sleep Research and Sleep Medicine (BASS). He has already organized the Sleeping Course of the Low Countries twenty-eight times, aimed at Flanders and the Netherlands (to date more than 2500 students).