Dr. De Ruysscher earned his medical degree at the University of Leuven, Belgium, in 1986, and became a radiation oncologist at the same university in 1991. In 1992, he obtained his PhD thesis from the University of Leuven on the influence of radiotherapy on immunity.

Prof. Dirk De Ruysscher specialises in lung cancer and pioneered the integration of molecular imaging in radiation treatment planning and individualised radiotherapy schedules.

De Ruysscher is currently a board member of the Dutch Lung Cancer Research Group, which he also co-founded. He was chairman of the EORTC Radiotherapy Translational Research Group and the EORTC Radiotherapy Lung Cancer Group. De Ruysscher was also an active member of the Cochrane Cancer Collaboration.

Hee is a reviewer for several international journals and for scientific committees including the Dutch Cancer Society: Koningin Wilhelmina Fonds (KWF), the Netherlands Organization for Health Research and Development: ZonMw, and the German Research Foundation: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).

From 2011 to 2015, De Ruysscher was also a member of the ESMO Lung & Other Thoracic Tumours Faculty Group.

He is currently member of the editorial board of Cancer Treatment Reviews, Radiotherapy and Oncology journal and the Journal of Thoracic Oncology. He is a member of the Dutch and the Belgian Guideline Committee for lung cancer.

He is actively involved in ETOP and ESMO, where he is involved in the ELCC and ESMO 2016 NSCLC tracks.

De Ruysscher coordinated work packages in several academic international (EU), Dutch and Belgian research projects, as well as cooperations with industrial partners such as Siemens, Philips, DSM and BMS. He heads the Division Maastro Clinical Trials and was coordinator of the biobank project at the Maastro Clinic that was able to include over 6000 patients for radio genomic studies.

He has supervised many PhD projects and is the study coordinator of 9 phase I studies, 20 phase II and 5 phase III trials, dealing with individualised radiation-dose escalation, combining targeted agents with radiotherapy, the development of new PET tracers, molecular pathways involved in radiation damage, individualised radiotherapy, proton therapy, meta-analyses, cost-effectiveness, immune therapy and PCI.

Dr. De Ruysscher ha published over 200 peer-reviewed Wi-1 papers and chapters in several scientific books.

Dr. De Ruysscher is a full Professor of Respiratory Oncology at the Maastricht University Medical Center, Maastricht, the Netherlands, and a full Professor of Radiation Oncology at the University of Leuven, Belgium, and has been a visiting Professor at the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Francis H. Burr Proton Therapy Center, Boston, MA, USA, the Departments of Human Oncology and Medical Physics, University of Wisconsin at Madison, USA and The Christie, Manchester University, Manchester, United Kingdom.