Esther Markus-Smeets

Esther Markus-Smeets studied Medical biology at the Radboud University in Nijmegen. During her master she specialized in programming and image analysis. She performed her graduation internship in the Computational Pathology group where she developed and evaluated digital image analysis software to fully automatically analyze the modes and extents of cancer cell migration in 3D cell cultures. In April 2018, she started her PhD at the Department of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine under the supervision of Erik Aarntzen and Martin Gotthardt. Her PhD will focus on both cancer biology and technical development of image analysis algorithms. She will investigate the effects of photodynamic therapy targeted towards activated fibroblasts in mouse models of pancreatic cancer. Furthermore, she will develop algorithms for automated analysis of the metabolic heterogeneity in pancreatic cancer. This research is performed in close collaboration with the Computational Pathology group, where she is supervised by Francesco Ciompi. In this study there is also an collaboration with the University Hospital of Essen with the group of Jens Siveke.