Jenny Dankelman

Jenny Dankelman is professor in Minimally Invasive Surgery and Interventional Techniques at the Delft University of Technology. She obtained her degree in Mathematics, with a specialisation in System and Control Engineering at the University of Groningen in 1984 and her PhD at the Delft University of Technology (DUT) in 1989. In 2001 she was awarded the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek chair and shortly after she became head of the Minimally Invasive Surgery and Interventional Techniques group (www.MISIT.nl).

Her interests and research projects are in the fields of designing novel medical instruments, training and simulation systems, and new methods to improve patient safety. She cooperates with several hospitals such as Leiden UMC where she holds a part time professorship position, and Erasmus MC Rotterdam. For her activities she was awarded the Royal award of Knight in the Order of the Netherlands Lion in 2018. A year later she was awarded de Professor of Excellence award of the Delft University of Technology and became member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).

A few years ago she started a number of projects to develop affordable multi-functional surgical instruments with a focus on low-resource settings (www.tudelft.nl/surgery-for-all/ ).