Professional Biography  

Dr. Behrooz Z. Alizadeh is an MD, and specialist in genetic epidemiology who obtained his MD from TUMS Tehran (1997), graduated in MSc (2001) and DSc (2002) degree from NIHES, Rotterdam, his Ph.D. from EMC–EU, Rotterdam (2005), and completed his postdoctoral fellowship in functional ImmunoGenomics at UMC Utrecht (2007). Since 2009, he is a staff member of the department of epidemiology acting as the head of the Unit of personalized medicine (2016) and is a member of the board of several research and/or educational programs and committees at UMCG Groningen, at METC UMCG (2012), and scientific international institutions. He holds visiting professor positions at several universities and is leading several (inter)national research projects (eg. MinldLines, GROUP, RadioGenomics, ARAS, CHARGE). During the 17 years of his professional scientific career, he published >200 publications of which the majority are in the top 10% of high-impact peer-reviewed journals. He is the principal investigator of educational institutes (eg. GUIDE, SHARE, GSMS, CPE) in the Netherlands. He has (co)supervised 25 PhDs fellows and postdocs.  

His current research is focused on the devising, modeling, but also clinical, and societal implementation of personalized medicine in cancer and psychosis. To this end, his research group utilizes a systematic approach that integrates heterogeneous cohorts and real-world multi-dimensional data from various diseases.  His approach contains advanced methodologies, data analytics, and genetic epidemiological techniques, including multi-dimensional reduction, growth curve trajectory modeling, mixed model analyses, and recently comparative machine learning techniques, to analyze and infer multi-level genetic, clinical (treatment), and societal data, aiming to predict patients’ long-term outcomes and response to therapies and interventions efficiently and accurately. In his view, personalized medicine is a health care process or even a societal program, rather than a research outcome!