Ernst Kuipers

Vice-Chair and Co-Founder | Former Minister of Health Netherlands

Ernst Kuipers is a Dutch gastroenterologist, born in Meppel in 1959, who studied medicine at Groningen and took his doctorate at VU University Medical Center in 1995. He spent 1995 to 1997 at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, then moved to Erasmus MC in Rotterdam as professor and head of gastroenterology and hepatology in 2000, joined its board in 2012 and was chief executive from March 2013 to January 2022. His research on gastrointestinal cancer and screening won the United European Gastroenterology Research Prize in 2016. From 2015 he chaired the Dutch National Acute Care Network, coordinating intensive care capacity through COVID-19. He was Minister of Health, Welfare and Sport for D66 from January 2022 to January 2024, concluding the Integrated Healthcare Agreement in 2022. He later joined Nanyang Technological University in Singapore as vice-president for research, and in 2025 the WHO Europe Pan-European Commission on Climate and Health. He chairs the supervisory board of Delft University of Technology, heads the Dutch national cancer registry and clinical auditing institutes, and co-founded Global Health Transformers.