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Tuesday July 01, 2025

Congratulations to Carolien van de Sandt
2023 ASI Career Advancement Awardee (Ada category)

We warmly congratulate
Carolien van de Sandt
winner of the 2023 ASI Career Advancement Award (Ada category)

 

I am a Research Fellow in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the Peter Doherty Institute, University of Melbourne (UoM). My research focusses on improving our understanding on how immunity is formed and why it fails in at-risk populations like the elderly and immunocompromised individuals. My aim is to use this knowledge to repaired immunity when it fails and develop novel vaccines and interventions for high-risk populations.

I completed my PhD in 2016 at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam in the Netherlands, where I investigated the longevity, cross-reactivity and immune evasion strategies of influenza-specific CD8+ T cells, followed by two years of postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Professor Rimmelzwaan and Professor Osterhaus. 

In 2018, I was awarded the European Marie Sklodowska-Curie Action (MSCA) Fellowship and the University of Melbourne’s McKenzie Fellowship to join the laboratory of Professor Katherine Kedzierska. My research focused on understanding the mechanisms that underly gain-and-loss- of CD8+ T cell function across human lifespan, which was recently published in Nature Immunology (van de Sandt 2023 Nature Immunology).  

During the pandemic I temporarily relocated to the Netherlands as part of her MSCA fellowship (2020-2021) where I led my own research team at Sanquin (the Dutch Blood bank) studying SARS-CoV-2 immunity upon infection and vaccination in healthy individuals and autoimmune patients. In 2022, I was awarded the ARC-DECRA fellowship to continue my Aging Immunity and T cell Development Research at the University of Melbourne. 

Fig: CEIRR-CIDER

CEIRR is a multidisciplinary and international collaborative research network funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and focusses on studies in key influenza research areas and providing pandemic responses.  The meeting is normally closed for PIs and their teams working in one of the 7 CEIRR centers, giving them the opportunity to share and present unpublished data. Professor Katherine Kedzierska, one of the PIs of CIDER (Center for Influenza Disease and Emerging Research), kindly extended an invitation to me to join this year’s meeting. I greatly enjoyed the high-quality research presentations at the conference, showcasing unpublished studies on viral transmission, surveillance (particularly the newly emerging bovine H5N1), virus-host interactions and viral immunity. The presentations on new technological advances in the field were of particular interest and included novel ways to measure viral antibodies and tracking viruses in transmission models. My poster presentation on the longevity of influenza virus-specific CD8+ T cell responses across different age groups was well received (manuscript in preparation).

Author: Carolien van de Sandt

Disclaimer: The views expressed are those of the author/s and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of ASI