Past Members
Georgios Kantidakis, PhD
Georgios Kantidakis got his PhD on November 23rd, 2022 at Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC). His research was a collaboration between LUMC, Mathematical Institute of Leiden University and the European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC). Driven by the growing trend towards personalized medicine, his research focused on the prediction of cancer survival using machine learning. It was funded by the Soft Tissue and Bone Sarcoma Group (STBSG) and the department of oncology at LUMC.
Doctoral Thesis: Kantidakis G (2022, November 23). Analysis of sarcoma and non-sarcoma clinical data with statistical methods and machine learning techniques.
Valentina Masarotto, PhD
Valentina is an Assistant Professor at the Mathematical Institute of Leiden University. Her research focuses on complexly shaped data, in particular continuous (functional) data and their variation in smoothness and fluctuation.
She collaborated with clinicians from Leiden University Medical Center for studying the "Effect of invasive aspergillosis on risk for different causes of death in older patients with acute myeloid leukaemia or high-risk myelodysplastic syndrome".
Maria Benedito Quelhas, MSc
Maria Quelhas worked at the Mathematical Institute of Leiden University. Her research focused on the development of new statistical methods to deal with cancer survival data in the presence of cure (long term survivors). The project was a collaboration with Dr. Eni Musta (Korteweg-de Vries Institute for Mathematics at the University of Amsterdam).
Sanne Willems, PhD
Sanne got her PhD on March 19th, 2020 at the Mathematical Institute of Leiden University. Her research focused on the analysis of survival data with ordinal variables, optimal scaling, and principal component analysis.
Doctoral Thesis: Willems SJW (2020, March 19). Advances in Survival Analysis and Optimal Scaling Methods
Anja Rüten-Budde, PhD
Anja Rüten-Budde got her PhD on March 10th, 2020 at the Mathematical Institute of Leiden University. Anja’s research focused on predictive performance indicators for survival models in soft tissue sarcoma and Ewing sarcoma. She led the methodological part of our PERSARC project on soft tissue sarcomas funded by KWF.
Anja won the C.J. Kok Jury Award 2020 for the best thesis (Personalised medicine for multiple outcomes: methods and application).
Doctoral Thesis: Rueten-Budde AJ (2020, March 10). Personalised medicine for multiple outcomes: methods and application
Carlo Lancia, PhD
Carlo Lancia was postdoctoral fellow at Mathematical Institute of Leiden University and guest fellow at Prinses Máxima Centrum. He is a skilled programmer and a multidisciplinary researcher. As a member of the DASPO group, Carlo's main research was framed in two projects funded by KiKa, which aimed at estimating the effect of treatment adaptations on survival outcome in osteosarcoma and leukaemia patients.
Marijn Soeteman, MD PhD
Marijn Soeteman is a pediatrician in training at the Wilhelmina Children's Hospital. She got her PhD on February 8th, 2024 at the University Medical Center Utrecht.
Her PhD research was in collaboration with the Princess Máxima Center for Pediatric Oncology (Utrecht) and focused on the timely identification of clinically deteriorating pediatric oncology patients, both at the inpatient ward and the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU).
Doctoral Thesis: Soeteman M (2024, February 8). Identifying the critically ill pediatric oncology patient
Georgy Gomon, MD
With a background in medicine and statistics, Georgy Gomon worked in the DRUP study, a large Dutch multi-center study examining the effectiveness of targeted anti-cancer drugs and immune-therapy. So far more than 1300 patients have been treated within the DRUP study and various publications have been released based on the DRUP data. This project is a collaboration between the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), the Mathematical Institute at Leiden University, the Department of Biomedical Data Science at LUMC and the Netherlands Cancer Institute.
Georgy is now PhD candidate at the LUMC.
Shelley-Ann Girwar, MD PhD
Shelley-Ann Girward got her PhD on June 22nd, 2023 at the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC). As risk stratification is an important tool in Population Health Management, the aim of her PhD project was to validate and calibrate a risk stratification model that is applicable in Dutch primary care. Her research was based on a risk stratification tool named Adjusted Clinical Groups (ACG), which was developed by the Johns Hopkins University.
Shelley-Ann is currently working as tutor, teacher and course coordinator within the Population Health Managements Master’s program at the LUMC and at Leiden University College (The Hague).
Doctoral Thesis: Girwar, SM (2023, June 22). Risk stratification in Dutch primary care: a promising approach to manage population health
Veroniek Muriël van Praag, MD
Veroniek van Praag is a PhD candidate at the Leiden University Medical Centre. She is an experienced medical researcher with a specific interest in orthopaedic oncology, and in tooling that allows scientific findings to be used in patient-doctor shared decision making.
Veroniek led the clinical part of our PERSARC project on soft tissue sarcomas funded by KWF.
Julie Willeumier, MD PhD
Julie Willeumier started her research at the Leiden University Medical Center within the orthopaedic department on the soft-tissue sarcoma project (currently the PERSAC project) and continued with the OPTIMAL Study to optimise the treatment of patients with symptomatic long bone metastases. Julie was in the lead of the OPTIMAL Study from 2014-2017 and developed a prognostic model for survival of patients with symptomatic long bone metastases. This model was implemented in an app (OPTIModel) for easy clinical use.
She defended her PhD thesis on November 6th, 2018 and is currently specialising in the orthopaedic field.
Doctoral Thesis: Willeumier JJ (2020, March 26). Optimising the treatment of patients with long bone metastases
Sarah Elise Bosma, MD PhD
Sarah Bosma started her research at the Leiden University Medical Center within the orthopaedic department where she worked on clinical decision-making and risk evaluation of Ewing sarcoma patients. The focus was on altering the treatment on an individual basis, thereby preventing over-treatment of low-risk patients and under-treatment of high-risk patients. She led the clinical part of the project on Ewing sarcoma funded by the Team Westland foundation. She was also working on image guided surgery using computer navigation and fluorescence for Ewing sarcoma.
She got her PhD on March 26th, 2020 at Leiden University and is currently specialising in the orthopaedic field.
Doctoral Thesis: Bosma SE (2020, March 26). Individual clinical advanced decision-making and risk evaluation for Ewing sacoma
Gerco van der Wal, MD
Gerco van der Wal worked at the Leiden University Medical Center, where he joined the OPTIMAL Study team in 2015. He was responsible for the expansion of the prospective OPTIMAL cohort and is in the lead since 2017. One of his research goals was to further improve the OPTIMOdel (a prognostic model for survival of patients with symptomatic long bone metastases).
Merel Jans, MD
Merel Jans worked at the department of pediatric surgery of the Princess Máxima Center for Pediatric Oncology (Utrecht). The aim of her research was to analyze the impact of surgery for Neuroblastoma. This regards the direct impact of the surgical resection on morbidity and mortality of the child, but also the effect of local control by surgery on local recurrence rates and survival.
Sara Trifkovic, MD
Sara Trifkovic collaborated with the department of radiotherapy at Leiden University Medical Center and the Netherlands Cancer Institute (Amsterdam) on the SCOPES study funded by KWF. The aim the SCOPE study is to improve quality of life for soft tissue sarcoma patients and their families by introducing a hypofractionated radiotherapy regimen with a decreased number of treatment sessions to lighten the treatment burden.
Past Guest Members
Danijela Koppers-Lalic, PhD
Danijela Koppers-Lalic works at Leiden University Medical Center (Medical Oncology & Medical Microbiology). Her research focuses on molecular biology, oncology and liquid biopsies as cancer diagnostic tools in clinical studies.
She was a guest at the Mathematical Institute of Leiden University from October 2022 to August 2023.
Francesca Ieva, PhD
Francesca Ieva is Associate Professor of Statistics at MOX – Modeling and Scientific Computing lab, Department of Mathematics, Politecnico di Milano (Italy), where she received her PhD in Mathematical Models and Methods for Engineering in 2012. Her research activity is mainly focused on statistical learning in healthcare research and biomedical context, both from a methodological and applied point of view.
Francesca was principal investigator of the cotutelle PhD project "Time-varying covariates for survival models".
Pietro Ravani, MD PhD
Pietro Ravani is Professor and Clinician Scientist in the Department of Medicine and Institute of Public Health at the University of Calgary. He received his medical training at the University of Parma (Italy), and completed a Master’s of Science in Biostatistics at the University of Pavia (Italy), followed by a PhD in Clinical Epidemiology at Memorial University in Newfoundland. He worked as a practicing physician in Italy until 2008, when he moved to Calgary to start his academic career. His research interests include statistical methods in outcomes research and design of clinical trials and longitudinal studies in kidney disease.
