Dr Rooman has been studying the pancreas during her entire scientific career, starting off with PhD studies on cell regeneration and plasticity in the context of cell therapy for diabetes, but gradually becoming more focused on cancer.

She twice set up a research group; In 2011, she was appointed at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Australia. Her team was devoted to finding new genes and pathways that are at play in pancreatic tumor development (hypothesis driven and unbiased integrative –omics analyses from the efforts of the International Cancer Genome Consortium). In 2016, she was granted an Odysseus fellowship from the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO) to build a research team at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium) where she is now full professor. Dr Rooman continues to work in the field of pancreatic (cancer) biology, studyingpancreatic exocrine cell plasticity in homeostasis and cancer;Exocrine acinar and ductal cells are the cells of origin for tumor formation. They study differentiation changes in these cells or subsets of these cell populations, and their role in tumor initiation. They also discovered a new cell type/state, i.e. pancreatic basal cells that are under investigation in non-neoplastic tissue and cancer. Lastly, they focus on the role of a set of axon guidance genes in cancer. Next to her research team, Dr Rooman has also taken on the Directorship of the new core-facility Visual and Spatial Tissue Analysis (https://vsta.research.vub.be) at VUB that serves academia and industry.