Marc Van Ranst


Marc Van Ranst is a Belgian virologist at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and the Rega Institute for Medical Research. On 1 May 2007 he was appointed as Interministerial comissionar by the Belgian federal government to prepare Belgium for an influenza pandemic.

Education

Van Ranst obtained a BA in medicine at Hasselt University in 1986 and later graduated as a medical doctor at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in 1990. From 1990 to 1993, he worked at the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, and received his PhD degree in virology in 1994. He also specialized in Laboratory Medicine for which he obtained a PhD at the K.U. Leuven.

Career

Academic career

He started working at the University Hospitals Leuven in 1999 and became Professor of Virology at the K.U. Leuven. Currently, he is associate chief of the department of laboratory medicine, and heads the diagnostic virology laboratory at the University Hospitals Leuven, Belgium. He is also the director of the AIDS reference laboratory and of the national coronavirus and rotavirus reference laboratories. Professor Van Ranst was appointed in 1999 to the Belgian high council for public health, where he heads the vaccination department.
Since 2012, he is the Chairman of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the KU Leuven. In his research laboratory, six PhD students and four MSc students are currently working on studies on the molecular evolution of DNA and RNA viruses.

Teaching

Professor Van Ranst teaches virology and computational genomics at the Faculty of Medicine at the KU Leuven.
Since 1995, he holds an affiliate academic position at the Faculty of Natural Sciences at Charles University in Prague, where he teaches Bioinformatics.

Science communication

He published over 270 scientific papers in peer reviewed journals and contributed eight chapters to books on molecular evolution and bioinformatics.
Marc Van Ranst is the chairman of the editorial board of VacciNews.net, a social media platform that provides accurate information on vaccines.

Awards

Van Ranst is very active on social media, particularly Twitter, where he addresses both professional and societal issues. In August 2014, he was the first person who used the term Gazacaust that created heavy reactions in the Jewish community in Belgium and abroad. Van Ranst is also a target of social media campaigns by right-wing Flemish nationalists in Belgium, for instance, in 2018 former interior minister Theo Francken nick-named Van Ranst as Doctor Hatred.