Ruben Dammers was born in Heerlen, the Netherlands, in 1975. He received his medical degree and PhD degree from Maastricht University, Maastricht, the Netherlands, in 2001 and 2003, respectively. The title of his thesis was "Non-invasive assessment of arterial remodelling in arteriovenous fistulas for hemodialysis".

From 2003 until 2009 he had his neurosurgical training at Erasmus MC, Rotterdam, the Netherlands. During this period, in 2007, he worked as a research fellow at the department of Neurosurgery, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Little Rock, AR, USA. From 2009 until 2011 he was appointed cerebrovascular and pediatric neurosurgical clinical fellow at the department of Neurosurgery, Erasmus MC and Sophia Children's Hospital. 

Since 2011 he hold a staff position at the department of Neurosurgery, Erasmus MC and Sophia Children's Hospital, Rotterdam, the Netherlands. His main clinical interests are in pediatric neurosurgery, skull base surgery, and cerebrovascular surgery.

Since 2013 he is an ESPN certified pediatric neurosurgeon. He has been a course directer for the Rotterdam Skull Base Course since 2016 and serves as faculty-member to multiple skull base, vascular and microvascular courses. Currently he is appointed co-director of the Erasmus MC Stroke Center and the Expertise Center for Complex Micro(vascular) Surgery Rotterdam.

His main fields of research interest are in the care for cerebral stroke, in particular the treatment of spontaneous intracranial hemorrhage (ICH), the treatment of chronic subdural hematoma, the treatment of aneurysmal subarchnoid hemorrhage, and the microvascular treatment of intracranial aneurysms. Concurrently, he is interested in cerebrovascular and skull-base neuroanatomy. He serves as scientific committee member of the CONTRAST consortium, dedicated to the care of acute stroke patients since 2015 and serves as PI in a nationwide randomised trial on the surgical treatment of ICH, running since 2017.