Johan Verjans

Dr. Johan Verjans, SAHMRI - Vascular Research Centre, Lifelong Health Theme

Senior Lecturer, University of Adelaide / SAHMRI

Deputy director, Medical Machine Learning, Australian Institute for Machine Learning

Associate investigator, Centre for Nanoscale Biophotonics, University of Adelaide

Cardiologist, Royal Adelaide Hospital

Johan Verjans is a Dutch cardiologist who joined Steve Nicholls' group in the Heart Health theme at SAHMRI in 2017, combined with a senior lecturer position at the University of Adelaide. He combines clinical work and research, working as a Cardiology Imaging Fellow at the Royal Adelaide Hospital. 

His research career has predominantly focused on translational pre-clinical and clinical imaging research using advanced intravascular and non-invasive molecular imaging strategies to detect, track and predict disease at an early stage working with Prof. Jagat Narula in California and as a post-doc at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. He continues this work at SAHMRI with preclinical projects, including MALDI imaging in addition to clinical molecular imaging of 18F-NaF uptake in human coronary arteries.

In recent years, his research has also focused on imaging biomarker detection using existing datasets, using supervised and unsupervised machine learning strategies on large biobanks. He was recently appointed deputy director of Medical Machine Learning at the Australian Institute for Machine Learning, one the most productive computer vision groups in the world. His main role will be to connect world-class machine learning capabilities to the biomedical precinct in Adelaide.

He was assistant-editor of a JACC Supplement (focusing on the Vulnerable plaque), besides being author of several book chapters and articles. Currently he is reviewer for 10+ journals, and he is Associate editor of the Netherlands Heart Journal and member of the Publications Committee of the Society for Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance.

Johan is more than happy to discuss and collaborate on imaging and machine learning projects in a multidisciplinary setting (small/large animals, clinical research).

 Please feel free to contact him at Johan.Verjans@SAMHRI.com .