Marlies Vanden Bempt

Marlies Vanden Bempt graduated from the KU Leuven as a Bioscience engineer in 2013, and started her doctoral research in the lab of Jan Cools in the VIB Center for Cancer Biology. Her research focused on discovering the mechanisms of leukemia development by generating CRISPR-based cell and mouse models. She subsequently worked as coordinator of the VIB Grand Challenges project on immuno-oncology, with the aim to identify biomarkers for immune checkpoint inhibitors by looking at human tumors on a single-cell level. Currently, she is following her passion for hematology as postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Daan Dierickx. Marlies loves to present her scientific results to the scientific community, but she is equally interested in bringing science into the lives of young and old non-scientists. For this, she went to primary schools to conduct scientific workshops, and she presented her PhD research on the Belgian national television. She was also a member of the organizing committee of the PhD conference ‘VIBes in Biosciences’ in 2017. In her own words: “I love science, talking and talking about science”.