Associate Professor / LUCID Teaching Coordinator
dr.ir. Marjolein Kikkert
Curriculum Vitae
Marjolein Kikkert studied Molecular Sciences at Wageningen University and Research Center, and did her PhD research on plant viruses at the Virology department of that University with prof. Rob Goldbach. She spent 6 months at Berkeley University in California, dept of Plant Virology with prof. Andrew Jackson, and then moved on to a postdoc position with Prof. Emmanuel Wiertz at RIVM and LUMC to work on herpesvirus immune evasion. She then moved to the group of Prof. Eric Snijder at LUMC, and became an assistant professor in 2011 and an associate professor in 2019. She currently supervises a group of 3 PhD students, and two technicians. She acquired several national and International research grants and research contracts with companies. Since 2024 she additionally is the coordinator of teaching and education of the Leiden University Medical Center of Infectious Diseases (LUCID).
Research
Her group specialized in viral innate immune evasion and its role in pathogenicity and disease outcome, especially for the coronaviruses such as MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 and also for flaviviruses such as West-Nile virus and Usutuvirus. Some of this knowledge is used to design and test innovative antiviral strategies, both antivirals and vaccines. She is also interested in developing controlled human infection models for testing novel antiviral vaccines, and she is coordinator of a work package (with a team of 20 researchers, technicians and project managers at LUMC Leiden, EMC Rotterdam, and international locations) in a large CEPI/EU co-funded project named MUSICC. The WP focuses on the GMP production of challenge viruses for testing novel coronavirus vaccines in controlled human infection models.
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