Gijs van Soest is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering of the Thorax Center, Erasmus MC, Rotterdam. His research focuses on the use and development of intravascular imaging methods for detection of coronary atherosclerosis. He is currently working on optical coherence tomography, intravascular photo-acoustic imaging, and intravascular ultrasound. These developments are carried out in close collaboration with clinicians of the Department of Interventional Cardiology. In 2005, he joined the Thorax Center as a post-doc, for a project on OCT elastography. Since then, his activities have broadened to include catheter development, automatic image analysis, and high-frequency ultrasonic imaging. In January 2010, he became a staff member of the Department of Biomedical Engineering. He obtained an MSc degree in Physics in 1997 at the University of Groningen. He then moved to the University of Amsterdam, where he did his graduate research on the interplay of light scattering and laser physics, receiving his PhD degree for the thesis "Experiments on Random Lasers" in December 2001. Between 2002 and 2005, he worked on remote sensing of atmospheric trace gases and satellite validation at the Royal Netherlands Meteorology Institute and the Space Research Organization of the Netherlands.
