Mohammad Arfan Ikram - Biography#
M. Arfan Ikram, MD, PhD (1980) is Professor and Chair of Epidemiology at the Department of Epidemiology, Erasmus MC Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He also holds adjunct professorships at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health (Epidemiology) and Leiden University Medical Center (Clinical Epidemiology). Since 2022, he has served as President of ZonMw, the largest national funder of health research in the Netherlands, and as a member of the Executive Board of NWO, the Dutch Research Council.
Dr. Ikram’s research centers on the etiology of neurological diseases in aging populations, with a primary focus on dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, and healthy brain aging. His work aims to detect the earliest, preclinical signs of neurodegeneration and to understand how these early changes progress to symptomatic disease. He also investigates systemic comorbidities and biomarkers that help identify individuals at highest risk, and has expanded his interests to healthy longevity, healthcare determinants, and population-level health trajectories. A major component of his work involves the development and application of advanced epidemiologic and data science methods, including causal inference, machine learning, and digital phenotyping.
Much of his research is embedded in the Rotterdam Study, a landmark population-based cohort of nearly 18,000 participants followed for over 35 years. He has extensive expertise in MRI-based imaging of brain structure and function, neuropsychological assessments, genome-wide and sequencing technologies, DNA methylation, and more recently, electronic gait assessments.
Dr. Ikram plays a key role in national research infrastructures, including EraCORe, BBMRI-NL, Health-RI, X-omics, and the Netherlands Cohorts Consortium. He has published over 1,225 peer-reviewed papers (195 as last author), with an H-index of 125 and >120,000 citations. His group currently includes 10 PhD candidates, 2 postdoctoral researchers, 2 MSc students, and 5 research staff, and he has successfully supervised 55 PhD theses. He has secured more than €20 million in competitive research funding.
Among his major scientific contributions, Dr. Ikram was a pioneer in the integration of imaging and genetics. As leader of the MRI working group of the CHARGE consortium, he co-authored four influential Nature Genetics papers (2012) that demonstrated the power of imaging genetics and laid the foundation for global collaboration now spanning more than 25 studies. In 2011, he was the first to report declining dementia incidence—likely attributable to improved cardiovascular prevention—showing that up to 30–40% of dementia cases may be preventable. He has also made major contributions to risk prediction models for neurological diseases, incorporating machine learning and deep learning approaches.
