Inventing His Own Career Path: Freek Beekman Talks with Johannes Czernin and Christine Mona About Success in Academia and Industry

Johannes Czernin, MD, editor-in-chief of The Journal of Nuclear Medicine (JNM) and a professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and Christine Mona, PhD, an assistant professor in Molecular and Medical Pharmacology at UCLA, spoke with Frederik (Freek) J. Beekman, PhD, a distinguished inventor, entrepreneur, and professor of Applied Physics at the Technische Universiteit Delft (TU Delft; The Netherlands), about his career in academia and industry. Dr. Beekman, who leads the Biomedical Imaging Division at TU Delft, is widely known for his innovations in advancing molecular imaging. He studied experimental physics at Radboud University Nijmegen (The Netherlands) and in 1995 received his doctorate from Utrecht University (The Netherlands), graduating in 1995 with a thesis entitled, “Fully 3D Reconstruction of SPECT Using Object Shape–Dependent Scatter Models.” From 1995 to 2008, he was a faculty member at the Image Sciences Institute and Department of Nuclear Medicine at University Medical Centre Utrecht (UMC Utrecht). In 2007, he went to TU Delft to head the radiation detection and medical imaging section.