Rate My Professor Stefaan Soenen

Stefaan Soenen is an associate professor in the Faculty of Medicine at KU Leuven, affiliated with the Department of Imaging and Pathology. He heads the NanoHealth and Optical Imaging Group and serves as a member of the KU Leuven Institute of Physics-based Modeling for In Silico Health (iSi Health) and the KU Leuven Cancer Institute (LKI). Additionally, he is the head of C-More. Prior to his current role, Soenen held a postdoctoral position at the Department of Pharmaceutics, Ghent University from October 2010 to September 2014, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at KU Leuven's Department of Biomedical Sciences from January 2014 to December 2017.

His research focuses on the biomedical applications of nanomaterials, primarily in cancer research. This includes investigating targeted delivery of nanomaterials to tumors, their therapeutic potential as monotherapy or combined with chemotherapy and immunotherapy, and developing advanced optical imaging methods such as ultrasensitive non-invasive luminescence, multiplexed in vivo luminescence and fluorescence, and multiparametric image-based flow cytometry. Soenen's group studies bio-nano interactions to enable translation into anticancer therapies and other biomedical uses. He leads multiple projects, including 'Lipid-Based Magnetic Nanoparticles for In Situ Programming of CAR-NK Cells Toward TNBC Hyperthermia-Immunotherapy and Efficacy Monitoring' (2025-2028), 'The generation and validation of DNA nanostructures for targeted siRNA delivery' (2024-2028), 'Nanoparticle-red blood cells hitchhiking for the targeted delivery of therapeutics to the lungs' (2023-2027), 'Experimental Risk Assessment of Biological Plasticizers' (2025-2029), and the ERC-funded NANONC project on exploiting nanoparticle toxicity in oncology. Soenen has contributed to numerous publications, such as 'Multinucleation resets human macrophages for specialized functions at the expense of mononuclear phagocyte identity' (2022), 'Massive Intracellular Remodeling of CuS Nanomaterials Produces Nontoxic Bioengineered Structures with Preserved Photothermal Potential' (2021), 'Whither Magnetic Hyperthermia? A Tentative Roadmap' (2021), and 'Role of inorganic nanoparticle degradation in cancer therapy' (2020). His work has garnered over 13,000 citations. He teaches courses on biomedical research skills, including 'Skills in Biomedical Research 3' and 'Scientific Reporting'.