Honoris causa doctorate for prof. Vander Heyden

7.12.2013

On December 6th 2013, prof. Yvan Vander Heyden received an honorary doctorate from the MUG. The ceremony took place at the Narkiewicz Auditorium Primum.

Prof. Vander Heyden was born in 1964 in Ninove (Belgium). In 1991 he earned his Master of Pharmacy diploma with the highest distinction from Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and in 1998 he earned his PhD from the same university (dissertation promotor: prof. D.L. Massart). In 2003 he was hired as visiting professor at VUB and in 2004 he earned the rank of full professor. Currently, prof. Vander Heyden is in charge of a team researching chemometrics and separation sciences.

His team’s motto is “rational application of new techniques in pharmaceutical analysis.” As many as 38 students and research staff from Poland, mostly from the MUG and Medical University of Silesia (Katowice) worked in prof. Vander Heyden’s lab. He promoted 30 doctoral dissertations on topics such as:

• design and validation of simple chromatographic methods for analysis of medications available on the African market;
• introduction of separation techniques to virology, in particular capillary electrophoresis;
• identification of distinct characteristics and modeling of the quantitative structure–property relationships (QSPR).

Prof. Vander Heyden published 17 chapters in textbooks and 330 full articles, which corresponds to about 750 Impact Factor points, h index = 38 and over 4700 citations. He is also the author or coauthor of 155 oral presentations and about 300 posters presented at international conferences. He was also part of the scientific or organizational committees of numerous onferences such as HPLC2007, PBA2008, RDPA2009, DA2010, CAC2010, HTC2012, CAC2012 and HTC2014. In addition, he was on the editorial board of “Analytica Chimica Acta”, “Talanta”, “Journal of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Analysis”, “Acta Chromatographica” and “LC/GC Europe.” In 2003, prof. Vander Heyden won the scientific award of the Belgian Royal Academy of Medicine. Whereas in 2007 he was awarded the Commemorative Medal of the MUG.