Team Members

Prof. Liesbet M. Peeters is the chair of the MS Data Alliance and an Assistant Professor at Data Science Institute and Biomedical Research Institute of Hasselt University (Belgium).

Lotte Geys has a background in biomedical sciences. She defended her PhD in 2017 at the University of Leuven and started working as clinical data manager afterwards. Since December 2019, she is working for the research group of Biomedical Data Sciences under supervision of Prof. Liesbet Peeters where she is currently employed as postdoctoral researcher.

Ashkan got his master degree  in industrial engineering in 2018 and after that did another master's in MBA. He has started his adventure as a joint Ph.D. student in mid-2019 with the close collaboration of STADUIS/ESAT lab of KU Leuven.

Tina Parciak has a background in Medical Informatics and has been part of the MS Data Alliance since its very beginning, bringing the topic of harmonisation of real-world data in MS forward.

Hamza Khan completed his Bachelor's in Dental Surgery before pursuing a Master's degree in Public Health (MPH) in 2019. During his internship at the International Organization for Migration (IOM - Regional Office for EU/EEA and NATO, Brussels), he gained insight into the importance of data and robust statistical methods/machine learning in healthcare research.

Marcel finished his applied computer science studies in 2017, earning a master's degree. Afterwards, he worked as a research associate at the medical data integration center of the university medical center Göttingen. During this time, he developed IT-infrastructures and worked as a health data engineer.

Sofie is a Master's graduate in Clinical Biomedical Sciences from Hasselt University. During her Master's education, she gained experience managing real-world data (RWD) at the University MS Centre Hasselt-Pelt and acquired insights into the current challenges related to it.

Dr. ir. Ilse Vermeulen is a Bio-engineer in Cell and Gene Biotechnology with a PhD in Medical Sciences from the Free University of Brussels (VUB), which she obtained in 2012. During her doctoral studies, Ilse focused on prediction models and epidemiological studies in the clinical biology of type I diabetes, which provided her with extensive experience in data processing and writing research articles for peer-reviewed journals.

For the past few years, Ilse has been working as a project manager at the University of Applied Sciences Leuven-Limburg (UCLL), where she was responsible for the respective focus lines "Environment & Health" and "Technology Enhanced Care".

In April 2022, Ilse joined the Research Group of Biomedical Data Sciences of Liesbet Peeters as a Staff Member and Project Manager to support the MS Data Alliance. Additionally, she leads the follow-up of other projects within the group, e.g. EBRAINS. Ilse is a vigorous creator, project enabler, and adept at transforming real-world data into real-world evidence.

Brenda is a graduate from the Master's program Globalization and Development Studies of Maastricht University. She has experience in non-governmental organizations and international organizations. This year (2022) she joined the team with great enthusiasm to focus on communication strategies.

Noëlla Pierlet is the Head of the Data Science team at ‘Ziekenhuis Oost-Limburg’ in Genk. She has over 25 years of experience in medical IT: she started as a system administrator, changed to software developer, project lead, and finally a data scientist. One of her specialties is bridging the gap between physicians and engineers. She is a pro at translating complex medical jargon into language that technical people can understand and vice versa.

Noëlla firmly believes that qualitative, structured data is the foundation for improving patient care. Her passion for using data to drive change and enhance healthcare has led her to pursue a PhD within the biomedical data sciences research group where she researches how to improve data quality in real world data.

Axel Faes received the M.Sc. degree in Computer Science Engineering from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven), Leuven, Belgium. He also received the M.SC. degree in Artificial Intelligence from the same university. In 2023, he obtained his PhD, titled "Finger Movement Decoding: From Source-Localisation to Tensor Regression Modelling",in Biomedical Sciences with the Computational Neuroscience Group of the Laboratory for Neuro- and Psychophysiology at KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium. Since 2024, he is working for the research group of Biomedical Data Sciences under supervision of Prof. Liesbet Peeters where he is currently employed as postdoctoral researcher.