Ron M.A. Heeren (1965) was appointed university professor and Limburg Chair at Maastricht University in 2014. In this capacity he works on translational molecular imaging. He is also the director of the Maastricht MultiModal Molecular Imaging Institute, M4I. M4I is a state-of-the-art molecular imaging institute that brings together a powerful palette of innovative imaging technologies. The institute’s mission is to carry out fundamental, instrumental and applied research into and using molecular imaging techniques in an interdisciplinary research programme in a leading international centre with relevance to science, education, the economy and society. Heeren obtained his doctoral degree from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Amsterdam in 1992. In 1999 he set up the research group ‘Macromolecular Ion Physics and Biomolecular Imaging Mass Spectrometry’ at the FOM Institute AMOLF. In 2002 he was appointed part-time professor at the Faculty of Chemistry, Utrecht University, his teaching and research remit being ‘physical aspects of biomolecular mass spectrometry’. In 2010 he was appointed a distinguished Wiley visiting scientist by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in the United States, where he took a four-month sabbatical. He is board member of the International Mass Spectrometry Foundation and co-founder of Omics2Image, a company that markets detector technology developed by CERN. With this company he won the national ‘Venture Challenge’ awarded by the Netherlands Genomics Initiative in 2013. His research interests are currently focussed on the continued development of fundamental, instrumental and applied mass spectrometry.

Please find an overview of all 13 UM Star Lectures here