Peter Siersema (Delft, 1959) graduated cum laude in 1984 at the Erasmus University. He was a student internship at St. Mary’s Hospital London, Hadassah University Hospital in Jerusalem and Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. From 1985 to 1994, Siersema was trained as an internist and afterwards as a gastrointestinal and liver doctor (MDL physician) in the Academic Hospital Rotterdam – Dijkzigt. Part of this training took place at the Department of Internal Medicine at the Charing Cross Hospital in London. Siersema obtained his doctorate in 1993 at the Erasmus University on a partly clinical, partly biochemical study of liver abnormalities in porphyria, a metabolic disorder of the production of haem.
From 1995 to 2007, Siersema worked as an MDL doctor and researcher at the Gastrointestinal and Liver Diseases department of Erasmus MC in Rotterdam, since 2003 as head of the gastrointestinal endoscopy department. In that period he was also a guest professor at Stanford University in the United States for over a year. In 2007, Siersema left for UMC Utrecht where he was appointed professor and head of the gastrointestinal and hepatic diseases department.Siersema received several awards for his work, including the Gastrointestinal Research Award from the NVGE (1999, 2014) and the Outstanding Manuscript Award from the ASGE (2011). He held the Endoscopy Foundation Lecture for the British Society of Gastroenterology in 2014 and is an honorary member of the Indian Society of Gastrointestinal Endoscopy. Siersema is the author or co-author of more than 500 PubMed-cited publications and supervised 40 PhD students in obtaining a doctor’s degree in medicine.
