Mark Waer

Mark Jozef Albert Waer, Baron Waer, born on 10 March 1951, is a Belgian physician and biomedical scientist whose career joined clinical nephrology, transplant immunology and university leadership. He studied medicine at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven from 1969 to 1976, qualified as a specialist in internal medicine with a focus on nephrology in 1981, and took a doctorate in medical sciences in 1983. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the Stanford University School of Medicine from 1983 to 1985 he returned to Leuven, became a professor of medicine in 1992 and in 1994 took charge of the Laboratory for Experimental Transplantation, the base of his work on how the immune system accepts or rejects transplanted organs. He then held senior posts in the university hospitals as medical director from 1998 to 2005 and as chairman from 2006, served as vice-rector of the Biomedical Sciences Group, and was elected rector of the university on 8 May 2009, taking office on 1 August of that year.