Megan Schuurmans and Natália Alves are awarded their doctoral degrees cum laude

On Friday, December 12th, Megan Schuurmans and Natália Alves both successfully defended their PhD theses in the Aula of the Radboud University. Megan defended her thesis entitled 'Artificial intelligence for pancreatic cancer guided by clinical need', while Natália defended 'Artificial intelligence for pancreatic cancer detection'. In a rare and remarkable achievement, both candidates were awarded the cum laude distinction, recognizing their work as belonging to the top 5–10% of doctoral research in applied AI for healthcare!

Both theses are the result of a closely intertwined PhD journey and a strong collaborative effort within DIAG. Together, Megan and Natália helped build pancreatic cancer AI research from an initial local dataset of 120 patients into a large, international cohort of more than 3,000 cases through the PANORAMA study, recently published in The Lancet Oncology.

Their defenses took place just hours apart and followed a jointly organized symposium, 'Precision oncology and AI - Lessons from pancreatic cancer and beyond', which brought together patients, researchers, clinicians, and industry. Attendees gained insights into where AI already delivers value in oncology workflows, the current limitations that still need to be addressed, and how methodological advances can be translated into clinically usable tools through effective collaboration. The symposium also highlighted why pancreatic cancer is a strong testbed for AI approaches that can generalize across healthcare.

We congratulate Megan and Natália on this outstanding achievement and wish them every success in their roles as Data Scientist at Sogeti (Megan) and Postdoctoral Researcher AI and medical video processing at Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine (Natália)!

Photo by Tiago Coelho.