Dr. Sjoerd Schetters was born on December 21, 1987 in London, United Kingdom. He received his Bachelor’s degree in Biology at the University of Utrecht in 2011, with a focus on neurobiology, neuropsychology, cell biology and oncology. After, he continued his studies with the Master Program at the University of Utrecht in Clinical and Experimental Neuroscience. During this time he interned a full year at the Dutch Brain Institute, Amsterdam under supervision of Prof. Elly Hol working on microglia in neurodegenerative diseases. Sjoerd continued his studies on microglia in the lab of Prof. V. Hugh Perry (University of Southampton, UK), under supervision of Prof. Dr. Diego Gomez-Nicola. He finished his Master’s Program writing his literature thesis on “NF-κB in brain (cancer) stem cells” under supervision of Dr. Pierre Robe, MD (Utrecht University Medical Center, The Netherlands). In 2014, Sjoerd received his Master’s degree and started his graduate studies in the lab of Prof. Yvette van Kooyk (Amsterdam UMC, The Netherlads), with a focus on anti-tumor vaccination. In 2015, Sjoerd visited the group of Dr. Ronald Germain (NIH, Bethesda, United States) to learn multiplex microscopy and histocytometry analysis. The results of his graduate efforts are presented in the thesis “Orchestrating the immune system to induce anti-tumor immunity”. For his efforts, he acquired the title of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) with honours (cum laude). In december 2020 he received the Van Bekkum thesis award from the Dutch Society of Immunology.
Dr. Schetters was first awarded the NWO Rubicon grant and later an FWO Junior Research Fellow grant to continue his research on type 2 immunity in the lab of Prof. Bart Lambrecht and Prof. Hamida Hammad at the VIB in Ghent, Belgium.
He is also active as a topic editor for the MDPI journal Vaccines and Frontiers in Immunology, and regularly reviews scientific articles for Vaccines, European Journal of Immunology, Frontiers in Immunology, Frontiers in Pharmacology, Cancers and Biomolecules.
Dr. Schetters is a member of the Dutch Society of Immunology, European Respiratory Society, Belgian Respiratory Society and the International Eosinophil Society.
Dr. Schetters is part of the Heterodox Academy, a non-profit advocacy group of academics committed to increase open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement.
Sjoerd's thoughts on academic vaccine research 