From 1990 to 1993, he worked at the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, and received his PhD degree in virology in 1994.
Professor Van Ranst was appointed in 1999 to the Belgian high council for public health, where he heads the vaccination department.
[2] Since 1995, he holds an affiliate academic position at the Faculty of Natural Sciences at Charles University in Prague, where he teaches Bioinformatics.
[1] He published over 270 scientific papers in peer reviewed journals[1] and contributed eight chapters to books on molecular evolution and bioinformatics.
Marc Van Ranst is the chairman of the editorial board of VacciNews.net,[3] a social media platform that provides information on vaccines.
[1] In 2009-10 he was an interministerial commissary for crisis management during the Mexican flu pandemic[1] In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Marc Van Ranst became a member both of the Belgian 'Risk Assessment Group' (RAG), which analyses the risks of coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 for public health, and of the 'Scientific committee Coronavirus' which advises Belgian health authorities on combatting the virus and which makes prognoses on its evolution and spread in Belgium.