Johan van Soest studied Medical Informatics at the University of Amsterdam. In his master thesis, he laid the groundwork for his expertise in clinical data science, focusing on genetic algorithms for optimization purposes, and prediction models to support clinical decisions. After his graduation, he started working at Maastro as a technical application manager for the Translational IT (TraIT) imaging work package. In this setting, he helped to setup, maintain and further develop the national imaging archive, which is still operational (http://www.ctmm-trait.nl). After a year, he started in August 2013 the PhD project to develop a distributed infrastructure for rectal cancer patient data analysis. The goal of this infrastructure was to perform clinical data science using an infrastructure where only algorithms and statistical results are shared, instead of data. He contributed to different research projects focusing on data extraction, semantic interoperability and analysis of clinical data collected in radiotherapy. Both for central and distributed analysis of data. From September 2017 he is working as postdoctoral researcher at Maastricht University, focusing on further extending the infrastructure and possibilities of distributed data analysis (the Personal Health Train initiative, see www.personalhealthtrain.nl).