Ilse Rooman

Prof. Rooman has been studying the pancreas during her entire scientific career, starting off with studies on pancreatic cell regeneration and plasticity, in the context of cell therapy for diabetes, and gradually becoming more focused on cancer. 

In 2011, she was appointed as a group leader at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Australia. Most of her basic research was devoted at finding new genes and pathways that are aberrantly expressed in pancreatic tumor development (hypothesis driven approach and unbiased integrative –omics analyses). Together with my team, she established powerful models to analyze the initiation of pancreatic cancer, and its relationship with pancreatitis. In this, she contributed to the efforts of the International Cancer Genome Consortium for mapping pancreatic cancer by new -omics methodology, resulting in several seminal papers in the field. 
In 2016, she returned to Belgium. Shortly after her return, she was granted an Odysseus fellowship from FWO to build a research team at VUB. she was appointed as Associate Professor. Since the start of 2025, she is a full professor who teaches General Pathology. She has also taken on the Directorship of core-facility Visual and Spatial Tissue Analysis (VSTA), for which she laid the foundations obtaining several infrastructure grants.

 
She has been taking leadership roles in national and international organizations (e.g. Scientific Advisory Board of Pancreatic Cancer UK, Foundation against Cancer and I continue as Program Director Pancreatic Cancer for the Anticancer Fund, Belgium) and has been serving on several grant/fellowship review panels (incl. FWO).

She has obtained several prestigious awards and funding including an Odysseus Fellowship (2016-2021), an EU-H2020-EUTOPIA grant, a Rising Star Award from United European Gastroenterology 2018, fellowships from the European Union - Marie Curie Program, the Francqui Foundation, the Cancer Institute New South Wales and a project grant from the National Health & Medical Research Council Australia.