Marc Van Ranst MD, PhD

Marc Van Ranst was born in Bornem, Belgium on June 20, 1965. He graduated as a medical doctor from the University of Leuven in 1990. From 1985 on, he trained at the Rega Institute for Medical Research in Leuven. From 1990 to 1993, he worked at the department of microbiology and immunology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York and received his Ph.D. degree in virology in 1994. In 1998, he became board-licensed as a specialist in clinical biology. Since 1999, he is a professor at the University of Leuven in Belgium. Since 2012, he is the chairman of the department of microbiology and immunology of the biomedical sciences group. Since 2010, he is a member of the University Hospitals Leuven Executive Board.

At the University Hospitals Leuven, he is currently head of the department of laboratory medicine. He also heads the clinical virology laboratory and is director of the AIDS reference laboratory and of several national reference laboratories.

Professor Van Ranst was president of the Vaccination section of the Belgian high council for public health from 1999-2014. From 2007 to 2016, he was responsible for influenza pandemic preparedness planning in Belgium, and he was responsible as an interministerial commissary for the Belgian crisis management during the Mexican flu pandemic in 2009-2010.

In his research laboratory, five Ph.D. students, three postdocs, and a varying number of master's degree students are currently working on studies on the epidemiology and molecular evolution of DNA and RNA viruses. He published over 392 scientific papers in peer-reviewed and Medline-indexed journals and contributed chapters to 25 books on viral molecular evolution and bioinformatics.

Professor Van Ranst teaches virology, epidemiology, and bioinformatics at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Leuven and at the University Colleges Leuven-Limburg in Belgium. Since 1995, he holds an affiliate academic position at the Faculty of Natural Sciences at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, where he teaches Bioinformatics.

In 2004 Professor Van Ranst was granted the European Clinical Virology Heine-Medin award of the European Society for Clinical Virology. In 2005, he received a doctor's honoris causa degree at the University of Kalmar in Sweden. He won the Best Teacher Awards at the University of Leuven.