Immunology in Space and Time – studying immune system kinetics with chemical biology

The research of Sander van Kasteren bridges the fields of chemistry and immunology. He completed his PhD in 2007 in the group of Prof. Benjamin G. Davis in Oxford, where he worked on carbohydrate total synthesis and its application to the development of MRI- and histological probes for the detection of early brain inflammation. This was followed by a period in the lab of Prof. Colin Watts at the University of Dundee. Here he worked on the development of protease inhibitors to improve antigen cross-presentation in dendritic cells. A second postdoctoral position in the groups of Huib Ovaa and Jacques Neefjes brought him back to the Netherlands and to chemistry, working on deubiquitinase inhibitors.

In 2012, he started his own group at Leiden University. In 2014 he joined the institute of chemical immunology of which he is now a board member and in 2018 was promoted to associate professor, and in 2021 he was promoted to full professor. He work has been funded by, amongst others, a Sir Henry Wellcome Fellowship, a Veni fellowship of the Netherlands Council for Scientific Research, and 2 ERC Grants (Starting/Consolidator). He was also awarded the 2012 Early Career Investigator Award by the British Biochemical Society.