Upon graduating, Barkhof joined the Department of Diagnostic Radiology at
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and co-published
Comparison of MRI criteria at first presentation to predict conversion to clinically definite multiple sclerosis in 1997. This led to the development of the
Barkhof Criteria for using MRI findings to predict conversion to clinically definite multiple sclerosis (MS). Following this publication, he became a Full Professor in Neuroradiology at Vrije's Department of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine and served as a senior staff member of their MS Center Amsterdam. Barkhof left Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in 2015 to accept an appointment as Professor of Neuroradiology at the
University College London. As a result of his academic work, Barkhof was awarded the 2018 John Dystel Prize by the National Multiple Sclerosis Society and the
American Academy of Neurology "for his outstanding contribution to multiple sclerosis research in the understanding, treatment and prevention of multiple sclerosis." Following this, he also received a Gold Medal from the
International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine for his contributions to MRI research. In 2018 and 2020 Barkhof was listed by Thompson-Reuters as one of the top 3000 most influential scientists world-wide. ==References==