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Suzanne Engelen

Clinical Research Fellow in Cardiovascular Inflammation

I am a third year Clinical DPhil student in the group of Prof. Claudia Monaco with a strong interest in cardiovascular inflammation. After obtaining my medical degree, I started the 3-year Clinical DPhil Programme at the Kennedy Institute in October 2019, funded by the Kennedy Trust. 

During the second year medical school my interest in research emerged. At first, I engaged in clinical studies at the departments of obstetrics and vascular medicine of the University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands. The clinical studies gave rise to more fundamental research questions, and I approached Professor Rohit Kulkarni at Harvard to engage in an extracurricular internship into the effect of insulin on T-lymphocyte function. During my research internship in Boston, I was thrilled to find that I immensely enjoyed fundamental immunological research. A second immunological internship under the supervision of Dr. Henk Schipper at the Laboratory of Translational Immunology of the University Medical Center Utrecht corroborated my passion for mechanistic immunological studies. 

In the Monaco group, we aim to build an interactive immune cell atlas of the vascular tissue in both health in disease. My DPhil project aims to understand specifically the role of Natural Killer T cells in vascular inflammation. Combining mechanistic studies of lipid antigen delivery, and Imaging Mass Cytometry (Hyperion) to identify the location, phenotype and cellular interactions, we aim to further understand the immune response in cardiovascular tissues. 

Recent publications

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