Hedwich Kuipers
Assistant Professor of Neuroimmunology
PhD
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Biography
Dr. Kuipers completed her BSc and MSc in Biopharmaceutical Sciences at Leiden University (1997-2001) in the Netherlands, her home country. She then obtained her PhD in Immunology (cum laude) at the Leiden University Medical Center (2001-2007) under the tutelage of Dr. Peter van den Elsen in the Department of Immunohematology and Blood Transfusion. Her project there was a collaboration with Dr. Paul van der Valk in the Department of Neuropathology of the VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam. After a short extended research project at the VU University Medical Center, she moved to Stanford University as a Human Frontier Science Program Fellow and completed a postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Lawrence Steinman (2009-2014) in the Department of Neurology and Neurological Studies. After this, she collaborated with and worked as a Research Scientist in the laboratory of Dr. Paul Bollyky, at the Department of Medicine, Infectious Diseases. She joined the Department of Clinical Neurosciences of the University of Calgary in 2018 as an Assistant Professor in Neuroimmunology, looking forward to joining a collaborative team of neuroscientists and immunologist and an active MS research community.
Dr. Kuipers’s research focuses on neuroinflammatory diseases such as multiple sclerosis (MS) and tries to understand the interaction between immune cells entering the central nervous system (CNS) and its resident cells. Her main focus is on astrocytes, a cell type in the CNS, whose role in neuroinflammatory diseases is much overlooked. She has shown before that these cells, which are the most abundant cell type in the brain, can release factors that help immune cells infiltrate into CNS tissue. She currently investigates how astrocytes interact with these immune cells and how they shape their responses, using molecular and cell biology approaches, as well as animal models of MS. Dr. Kuipers welcomes graduate students and postdocs with an interest in the intersection of immunology and neuroscience to inquire about joining her group.