Bram Verstockt, MD Phd
Gastroenterology
Bram Verstockt is assistant professor at KU Leuven (Leuven, Belgium) and staff member of the Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology at the University Hospitals Leuven since 2021. Within our unit, Bram is responsible for the multidisciplinary clinic with our colorectal surgeons and the implementation of intestinal ultrasound for patients with inflammatory bowel diseases.
Bram graduated medical school at the KU Leuven in 2013, and obtained his Belgian board certification in Gastroenterology in 2021. In 2021 he performed an additional fellowship at Lüneburg University, to implement the use of intestinal ultrasound (IUS) in our IBD unit in Leuven as IBUS-ESGAR certified IUS specialist.
In 2015, he partially interrupted his GI residency start his PhD with support of the Flemish Foundation for Scientific Research (FWO) ‘Predicting outcome in inflammatory bowel diseases, a multi-omics approach – Creating opportunities for personalised medicine’. During the first year of his PhD, he worked at the University of Cambridge and Addenbrooke’s Hospital (Cambridge, United Kingdom), in the lab of professor Kenneth Smith in collaboration with dr. James Lee.
His clinical research focusses on the use non-invasive monitoring using intestinal ultrasound and the optimisation of radiology tools in the monitoring of IBD (radiomics). His translational research focusses precision medicine in IBD, as well as on unravelling IBD disease heterogeneity (including perianal disease and fibrostricturing disease) using multi-omics and organoid models. He co-founded the international COLLIBRI proteomics consortium in IBD.
Bram is board member of the Young European Crohn’s and Colitis organisation (Y-ECCO) committee, the International Bowel Ultrasound group (IBUS) Scientific Committee and the Scientific Committee of the Belgian IBD Research group. He is currently chairing the Belgian IBD Biobank (BIO-BIRD). Finally, he is associate editor of the Journal of Crohn’s and Colitis, and reviewer for many gastroenterology journals and conferences.
Bram received several awards including the Prijs Prof. Dr. Jan De Grootte in 2013, the Horlait-Dapsens Prize in 2020 and the KU Leuven Research Council Award in Biomedical Sciences in 2022. In 2020, he qualified for the semi-finals of the Flemish PhD Cup.
