Bart I. Roman obtained his Master’s Degree in Chemical Engineering and his PhD in Applied Biological Sciences from Ghent University, Belgium. He trained in medicinal chemistry with Chris Stevens (Ghent University, Belgium) and in experimental cancer research with Marc Bracke (Ghent University Hospital, Belgium). After his post-doc, he developed several research lines in mechanobiology and targeted cancer therapeutics at Ghent University. In 2019, he was awarded the Young Medicinal Chemist in Academia Prize by the French Society for Medicinal Chemistry.
Christian V. Stevens is a senior professor in the Department of Green Chemistry and Technology at the Faculty of Bioscience Engineering (Ghent University). He graduated from the same department as a bio-engineer in chemistry in 1988 and obtained a Ph.D. in 1992 as a fellow of the National Fund for Scientific Research. During his PhD, he also worked as a research assistant at the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, USA. After his PhD at Ghent University, he did post-doctoral work at the Center for Heterocyclic Compounds at the University of Florida, USA. His current research interests focus on the synthesis of anti-metastatic compounds.
Olivier De Wever dedicates his scientific life to understanding the involvement of the tumor environment in cancer progression. During his PhD, he published seminal fundamental papers showing the importance of CAF in colon cancer progression. During his post-doc, he continued to focus on the origin of CAF and expanded his research ideas into cancer-associated adipose tissue. He was a visiting scientist at NIH (Bethesda, US), Centre de Recherche Hôpital Saint-Antoine (Paris, France) and the University of Calgary (Calgary, Canada). Currently, he is working as a Full Professor at Ghent University. In his 20-year-long scientific career, he has published more than 200 A1 papers, has an H-index of 55 and is an editorial board member of an important oncology journal—Cancer Research.
Robrecht Raedt obtained his M.Sc. degree in Biology at Ghent University (Belgium) in 2002. In 2007, he completed his PhD research at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences of Ghent University. He worked as a post-doc at 4BRAIN, focusing on unraveling the mechanism of action of neurostimulation
therapies for epilepsy. Currently, he is an Associate Research Professor at Ghent University. Since January 2018, he has been appointed the Department Head of the Animal Facility at the Faculty of Medicine at Ghent University.
