About

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 prestigious 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 the brain-resident macrophage, the 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 Dr. Diego Gomez-Nicola. Spearheaded by Dr. Gomez-Nicola, he published two papers as second and shared first author, in GLIA and Brain, respectively. 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). Additionally, his hypothesis on the interaction between microglia and T cells was later published in Frontiers in Immunology in a collaborative effort with Dr. Gomez-Nicola and Yvette van Kooyk. 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) learning multiplex microscopy and histocytometry analysis supervised by Dr. Michael Gerner and Dr. Antonio Baptista. 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 awarded the NWO Rubicon grant to continue his research on eosinophils (immune cell type involved in allergy) in the lab of Prof. dr. Bart Lambrecht and Prof. dr. Hamida Hammad at the VIB in Ghent, Belgium.