Leiden University Medical Center

I am a B cell immunologist and lead the Molecular Immunology team at Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) in the Netherlands. Our team aims to uncover the fundamental principles that govern effective and durable B cell immunity in humans following infection or vaccination. To achieve this, we develop innovative multi-omics approaches, complemented by advanced bioinformatics pipelines, to characterize immune response quality at the level of single B cells and monoclonal antibodies. I gained single B cell expertise during my PhD and postdoctoral work in Germany, and I am now expanding this work to include multi-omics within my recently established team at LUMC. With a central focus on B cell immunology, our research addresses variations in immune response quality across infectious diseases such as malaria, COVID-19 and yellow fever, as well as the modulation of responses during immunoregulatory helminth infections, including schistosomiasis and hookworm infections. Through our international collaborators, I aim to uncover the molecular mechanisms underlying protective B cell responses, ultimately providing a blueprint for future vaccine design. 

I am a cross-disciplinary Biomedical scientist interested in data-driven approaches to immunological research. With a background in clinical laboratory science, I recently completed a master’s in biomedical science at Radboud University (Netherlands), where I developed strong computational skills for the analysis of large-scale immunological datasets. For my PhD project, I aim to understand the mechanisms responsible for protective and long-lasting immunity to vaccination and to contrast these with signatures of immunological hypo-responsiveness. To investigate this, I will be carrying out a comparative analysis of the immune response to vaccination against tropical diseases such as Malaria and Yellow fever by integrating single cell omics data with functional assays to derive mechanistic insight into vaccine response.