Professor Sibrandes Poppema is the President and Vice-chancellor of Sunway University in Malaysia since January 2021 and a Jeffrey Cheah Distinguished Professor and Advisor to Tan Sri Jeffrey Cheah since January 2019. He studied Medicine, trained as a pathologist and obtained a doctorate in Immunopathology from the University of Groningen and was a postdoc at Harvard University. He published 260 articles with 21,000 citations and an H-factor of 84 and is among the top 2% authors in the field of immunology.
From 2008-2018 he was President of the University of Groningen, from 1999 to 2008 Dean and Vice President of the University Medical Center Groningen and from 1995-1999 the Chair of the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. From 1987-1995 he was a Professor of Pathology at the University of Alberta and Director of Laboratories at Cross Cancer institute. From 2011 till 2021 he was Honorary Consul General in the Northern Netherlands for the Republic of Korea.