Joleen Masschelein

Joleen Masschelein was born in 1986 and obtained her M.Sc. and PhD at the Faculty of Bioscience Engineering at KU Leuven under the guidance of Prof. Rob Lavigne, Abram Aertsen and Chris Michiels. She was subsequently awarded a Marie-Sklodowska Curie Individual Fellowship from the European Commission to perform postdoctoral research in the group of Prof. Greg Challis at the Department of Chemistry at the University of Warwick (UK). In 2017, she joined the Laboratory for Medicinal Chemistry (Prof. Piet Herdewijn) in the Rega Institute at KU Leuven as an FWO postdoctoral research fellow. In 2020 she was appointed as a group leader at the VIB-KU Leuven Center for Microbiology and as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Biology at KU Leuven. Research in her lab is focused on the genomics-driven discovery of new medicines from underexplored micro-organisms, as well as the engineering of microbial cell factories for the production of industrially-important molecules and other biotherapeutic applications. Joleen has co-authored 21 publications and 2 patent applications, and currently serves on the editorial advisory board for the journal Synthetic and Systems Biotechnology.