In the fight against cancer, we need to make sure the medical specialists have the right 'weapons'. 

Fons van der Sommen studied Electrical Engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e, the Netherlands) where he obtained his MSc in 2012 with the distinction cum laude. The year before his father had died of cancer, with motivated him to investigate the feasibility of an algorithm for the computer-aided detection of esophageal cancer. This resulted in three publications on international conferences. Following his Master's studies Van der Sommen continued to work on computer vision methods for esophageal cancer detection in collaboration with the Catharina Hospital (Eindhoven) while pursuing a PhD degree. In 2017 he obtained his doctorate with his thesis 'Computer-aided detection of early Barrett's cancer', again with the distinction cum laude. In 2018, after having been a postdoctoral researcher at TU/e for a year, he was appointed assistant professor at the research group Video Coding & Architectures of the TU/e department of Electrical Engineering. That same year he was awarded the TU/e PhD thesis prize.