Throughout her scientific career, Karin Strijbis has been fascinated by host-microbe interactions and the arms race of human and microbial coexistence. She performed her PhD research with a focus on microbiology and metabolism in the Department of Medical Biochemistry in the Academic Medical Center (AMC) in Amsterdam. There she studied metabolic adaptation of the yeast Candida albicans, an opportunistic commensal of the human gastrointestinal tract. Next, she moved to Boston and worked as a postdoc on anti-fungal immune responses in the lab of Hidde Ploegh at MIT. Innate immune receptors were the main topic of her postdoctoral work and she contributed to the development of the sortagging methodology. In January 2014, she was appointed Assistant Professor at the Infection Biology section of the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine at Utrecht University. There, she established her research group on host-microbe interactions at mucosal surfaces including the intestine, respiratory tract and vagina. She has received prestigious grants including an ERC starting grant and an ZonMW-TOP grant. In 2020, she was appointed as Associate Professor Mucosal Infection Biology. Since 2021, she is the chair of the Infection Biology section.
Positions
September 2020 – present, Associate Professor of Mucosal Infection Biology
Utrecht University (The Netherlands), Division Infectious Diseases and Immunology
Department of Biomolecular Health Sciences, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine
Topic: Bacterial infections at mucosal surfaces
January 2014 – August 2020, Assistant Professor of Infection Biology
Utrecht University (The Netherlands), Department of Infectious Diseases and Immunology
Laboratory of Prof. Jos van Putten
Topic: Bacteria-mucin interactions in the intestinal tract
June 2009 – November 2013, Postdoctoral fellow
Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, MIT, Cambridge, MA (USA)
Laboratory of Prof. Hidde Ploegh
Topic: Innate immune responses to pathogenic fungi and sortase technology
March 2011 – April 2011, Visiting scientist
Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto (Canada), Department of Biochemistry
Laboratory of Prof. Sergio Grinstein
Topic: Phagocytosis membrane imaging using biosensors
January 2004 – April 2009, Ph.D. student
Academic Medical Center (AMC), University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands), Department of Medical Biochemistry
Laboratory of Dr. Ben Distel and Prof. Hans Aerts
Topic: Metabolic adaptation and defense against oxidative stress in the fungal pathogen Candida albicans
Funding
2022 - 2024: ERC proof of concept grant to develop a mucinase-based biological to enhance cancer treatment.
2020 - 2025: ERC starting grant to investigate how bacteria-mucin interactions impact health and disease of the intestinal tract.
2019 - 2024: ZonMW-TOP grant for a collaborative project on the impact of vaginal microbiota on HIV transmission.
2020 - 2022: OneHealth funding to establish intestinal and lung primary models from different animal species.