Biography
Prof. dr. M.A. (Mark) van Buchem (1960) is professor of neuroradiology at the department of Radiology at the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC). He obtained his medical degree (1988) and his PhD degree (1992) at Leiden University. Following completion of his radiology residency program at the LUMC in 1994, he was a visiting research fellow at the Neuroradiology Section of the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center in Philadelphia in 1994-1995. In 1998 he became Chief of Neuroradiology at LUMC, and in 2002 he was appointed as Professor of Neuroradiology at the same institution. In 2005-2006 he was visiting professor at Harvard Medical School and neuroscientist at the A.A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging of the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, USA. In the period 2014-2024 he was head of the department of Radiology at the LUMC. As of 2024, his major focus is on development and implementation of radiological innovations in intramural and extramural healthcare.
Among van Buchem’s major initiatives have been: founding and leading of the LUMC Neuroimaging Research Group at the LUMC, founding of the C.J. Gorter Center for High-field MRI at the LUMC, co-founder and former chairman of the board of the Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition at Leiden University, co-founding and leading the Medical Delta Imaging Institute (a collaboration between the universities of Leiden, Delft and Rotterdam), co-founding a clinical artificial intelligence platform at the LUMC and Leiden University (CAIRELab) and initiating the value-based healthcare program at the LUMC. He has been leader of several national research consortia, such as “In vivo molecular diagnostics in Alzheimer’s disease” and the national project “the Heart-Brain axis”. As a consultant of the National Institutes on Aging (NIH) he has been involved in the design, implementation and analysis of the population-based Age, Gene/Environment Susceptibility Study in Iceland. Van Buchem founded the Dutch Cerebral Amyloid Angiopathy (CAA) Foundation and the International CAA Association, two organizations that have a major contribution to the international field of CAA research. Together with prof. Steven Greenberg, from Harvard University Medical School, he initiated a study program in Dutch-type CAA patients in the Netherlands.
Over the years, van Buchem has been actively involved in several professional organizations, such as the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (member of the Board of Trustees: 1999-2000) and the Dutch Society for Neuroradiology (president: 2002-2005).
His scientific research is focused on neurodegenerative diseases in general, and cerebral small vessel disease and CAA in particular. This research is embedded in an international network. He has published more than 500 scientific papers and he supervised more than 50 PhD theses.