I am a postdoc studying cellular host factors involved in alphavirus replication.
During my master’s degree in biotechnology at Wageningen University, I became interested in viruses, vaccines, and viral vectors. Supervised by Dr. Gorben Pijlman, I conducted a master thesis at the Laboratory of Virology, developing a secreted trimeric chikungunya virus spike vaccine. Thereafter, I performed an additional master thesis at the Bioprocess Engineering Department under the supervision of Dr. Dirk Martens on the development of a virus-like particle vaccine production process using a baculovirus-insect cell expression system. I finished my master studies with an internship supervised by Dr. Leszek Lisowski at the Translational Vectorology Group at the Children’s Medical Research Institute in Sydney, Australia. Here I optimized an adeno-associated virus vector production system based on mammalian suspension cell transfections.
My interest in virology led to a PhD project at the Laboratory of Virology of Wageningen University, where I studied the potential for recombination between self-amplifying mRNA vaccines and wild-type viruses supervised by Dr. Gorben Pijlman. I performed part of this project at the Inflammation Biology Group of Prof. Dr. Andreas Suhrbier at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research Berghofer, Australia. During my time as a PhD student, I had the pleasure to organize the Dutch Arbovirus Research Network meeting in 2021 and was an active member of the Wageningen PhD Council and the chair of the PE&RC PhD Council.
Still driven by curiosity, I am currently studying cellular host factors involved in alphavirus replication. I perform this research as a postdoctoral fellow in the group of Prof. Dr. Gisa Gerold and Prof. Dr. Magnus Evander in the Department of Clinical Microbiology at Umeå University.