Rick Groenland

RESEARCH

From early 2016 I have been working at the LUMC as research technician in the PERISCOPE project. This project aims to investigate and understand correlates of protection and inform the design of a new vaccine against Bordetella pertussis. Our aim is to identify and validate biomarkers of protective immunity and my role specifically is: processing, acquisition and analysis of samples from the vaccination and challenge studies; acquisition and analysis of samples for automated database validation; optimization of pre-clinical phase of samples collection; development of strategy to analyse antigen-specific cells; reporting and data presentation.

CURRICULUM VITAE

I obtained my  bachelor’s degree in medical and biological laboratory research here in Leiden in early 2013. During this degree I became acquainted with all the basic techniques in laboratory research and specialized in molecular biology in the last 2 years. During my internship at the department of Experimental Immunohematology at Sanquin Research in Amsterdam I developed a qPCR assay that measures the circulating cell free DNA secreted by neutrophils in the form of neutrophil extracellular traps (NET’s) in the plasma of sepsis patients to help determine both severity and survivability of this infection. After my bachelor I worked at Sanquin to help study the Ig gene repertoire of Rhesus D-specific B cells in the peripheral blood of hyperimmunized donors at the single cell level.