Dr. S. A. (Simone) Joosten, PhD

I am an Associate Professor in Immunology at the Leiden University Medical Center, The Netherlands. Having a biomedical background with a specialization in immunology, my main interest is to understand the human immune system in health and disease. Over the last decade my group has been working on host immunity towards tuberculosis (TB), with a strong translational focus. We consider it pivotal to assess the sum of immune responses rather than isolated components and ideally assess these from a functional perspective. Vaccination is an ideal model to investigate early immune activation, which we consider essential for outcome. We have been interested in innate and adaptive cellular as well as humoral immunity towards Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb). We aim to combine clinical data and samples with functional immunological characterization of the responses.