Dr. Dirk de Ruysscher earned his medical degree at the University of Leuven, Belgium, in 1986, and became Radiation Oncologist at the same university in 1991. In 1992, he obtained his PhD thesis at the University of Leuven on the influence of radiotherapy on immunity. At present, Dr. De Ruysscher is full Professor of Radiation Oncology/ Respiratory Oncology both at the Maastricht University Medical Center, Maastricht, and at Erasmus MC, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
He heads of the Division Maastro Clinical Research, chairs the EORTC Lung Cancer Group/ Oligometastatic and new development group and was the former chair of DUPROTON (the Dutch organization for proton therapy research) and of the Dutch Platform for Radiotherapy of Lung Cancer.
He is the coordinator of the biobank project at Maastro Clinic that was able to include about 10,000 patients for radiogenomic studies.
He was or is the study coordinator of seven phase I trials, twenty-four phase II trials, eight phase III trials and one observational study, dealing with individualized radiation-dose escalation, combining targeted agents with radiotherapy, the development of new PET tracers, molecular pathways involved in radiation damage, individualized radiotherapy, proton therapy, meta-analyses, cost-effectiveness, radiomics, prophylactic cranial irradiation, immune therapy and predictive and prognostic molecular biomarkers.
In 2019, he received the biennial ESTRO Claudius Regaud Gold Medal.
Dr. De Ruysscher published more than 500 peer-reviewed Wi-1 papers and chapters in several scientific books and has a H-index of 103.