Prof. Van Damme is currently leading the Neuromuscular Reference Center at the University Hospital in Leuven. In 2008 he was a visiting neuromuscular fellow at MGH and a researcher at the Day Laboratory of Harvard Medical School in Boston. Since 2009 he has been appointed as a neuromuscular specialist at the neurology department at UZ Leuven and as a professor at the Department of Neuroscience at KU Leuven. He is actively involved in clinical research, including genetic, biomarker, and neuroimaging studies and clinical research.

Currently, he is heading the chair of the EAN guideline panel on ALS. Prof. Damme is also a principal investigator in the laboratory for Neurobiology. The current research focuses on genetic modifiers of ALS and on disease pathways in pluripotent stem cell models, including investigating HDAC6 inhibition as a promising therapeutic concept. He has more than 200 publications in international peer-reviewed journals on ALS.