Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie (VIB)

Roosmarijn Vandenbroucke obtained her Master‘s degree in Biotechnology in 2001 at Ghent University (Belgium). After two years in the lab of Prof. F. Van Roy at the Faculty of Sciences, she started in 2003 as a research assistant in the Ghent Research Group on Nanomedicines where she obtained a PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences (Ghent University) in 2008 on ‘Non-viral delivery strategies to guide therapeutic nucleic acids through cellular barriers’. In 2009, she obtained a fellowship from Ghent University (BOF) and one year later from the FWO (The Research Foundation – Flanders) to start as a postdoctoral fellow at the VIB (Flanders Institute for Biotechnology) in the group of Prof. Claude Libert in the Inflammation Research Center (IRC). In 2015, she started her own group and her research deals with the identification of novel therapeutic targets to treat systemic and neuroinflammatory diseases, focusing on the gut and brain epithelial barriers.

Sophie Steeland is PhD student at the VIB-UGent Center of Inflammation Research in Ghent, Belgium. In 2012, she obtained a Master’s degree in Drug Development at the Faculty of Pharmacy of Ghent University. During her master thesis, she studied the role of matrix metalloproteinase 8 (MMP8) at the choroid plexus. Her PhD research under the supervision of Prof. Claude Libert and Prof. Roos Vandenbroucke focusses on the inhibition of central mediators in inflammatory diseases like the inhibition of tumor necrosis factor receptor 1 (TNFR1) and MMP8 using Nanobodies.