Sandra Van Puyvelde

Prof. Sandra Van Puyvelde is an Assistant Professor at the Laboratory of Medical Microbiology (University of Antwerp, Belgium) and a Senior Research Associate at the Cambridge Institute of Therapeutic Immunology & Infectious Disease (University of Cambridge, UK). She received her MSc and PhD degree in Bioscience Engineering at the University of Leuven (Belgium). In her PhD research, she studied Salmonella Typhimurium gene regulation during biofilm formation. After her PhD she obtained an advanced MSc degree in Statistical Data Analysis at the University of Ghent (Belgium) and worked as a research fellow at the Institute of Tropical Medicine Antwerp (Belgium) studying invasive non-typhoidal Salmonella infections from sub-Saharan Africa using genomics approaches and in close collaboration with global partners from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Rwanda, Benin and others. Prof. Van Puyvelde is a visiting researcher at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge since 2015, collaborating with Prof. N. Thomson and Prof. G. Dougan. In her research, Prof. Sandra Van Puyvelde combines bioinformatics and molecular approaches to understand bacterial infections, their resistance to antibiotics and evolution towards invasiveness. She is particularly interested in Salmonella and E. coli causing invasive infections. She is a member of the Belgian Young Academy.