Yvan Saeys

Yvan Saeys obtained his PhD in computer science from Ghent University in 2004. After completing research stays at the University of the Basque Country (Spain) and the University of Lyon (France) he returned to Belgium and established the Data Mining and Modeling for Biomedicine (DAMBI) research group at the VIB Center for Inflammation Research (IRC) in Gent.
As of 2015, he is a professor in machine learning at Ghent University and a principal investigator at VIB, where he is heading an interdisciplinary research team of 21 people, consisting of mathematicians, computer scientists, engineers and bioinformaticians. The Saeys lab studies the design and application of computational modelling and AI techniques for high-dimensional single-cell and spatial omics data, including methods to model cell developmental trajectories and intercellular communication. The research interests in the lab span the continuum from fundamental machine learning research towards clinical applications. Yvan Saeys received several awards including the AstraZeneca/FWO award “Patient care in the AI era”, several CZI grants, and has been identified for several consecutive years as a “highly cited researcher” by Clarivate analytics.