Specialization
Neurologist, Neuromuscular disorders
Focus of research
The Department of Neurology performs clinical and translational research within three research themes: infection & inflammation, cerebrovascular disorders, and movement disorders. The themes are imbedded in the nine translational research programs of Amsterdam Neuroscience, the research institute of neuroscience investigators in the Amsterdam area. All staff members of the Department of Neurology are involved in research and collaborate within Neuroscience Amsterdam, with other academic and non-academic hospitals, and with international research groups.
Infection & Inflammation
We perform clinical translational research in the field of neurological infections & inflammation. We perform prospective clinical cohort studies, randomized clinical trials, and experimental research, combining our clinical expertise with groundbreaking, translational approaches using clinical data, human samples, next generation sequencing, in vitro techniques, and mouse models in the era's of bacterial meningitis & encephalitis, infections after stroke, septic encephalopathy, and inflammatory diseases of peripheral nerves and muscles.
Since the completion of my Neurology training in 2012 I have been working as a neurologist, with a special interest in neuromuscular diseases and neuroimmunology. In daily practice, I see patients with all kinds of neuromuscular disease, such as motor neuron disease, myopathies, and neuropathies. My specific area of interest is chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP). Other areas of expertise include myositis, neurological manifestations of sarcoidosis and various inflammatory neuropathies (GBS, MMN, vasculitis). As one of GBS/CIDP Foundation centers of excellence, we seek to improve treatment in CIDP and other inflammatory neuropathies. In 2015 I finished my PhD thesis ‘Treatment of chronic inflammatory neuropathies’. Currently I am combining a translational approach to search for biomarkers of disease activity in CIDP and clinical research that focuses on long-term outcome of the disease. I am the coordinating investigator of a multicenter randomised controlled trial (OPTICl) to study the additional effect of corticosteroids to achieve remissions. In recent years I have initiated several CIDP studies and have participated in international randomised controlled trials in CIDP. As the principal invstigator of INCbase, an international CIDP registry and biobank, I hope to improve international collaboration and to contribute in discovering new treatments for this rare disease.
I also consider disease overarching-approach in rare diseases of vital importance. As one the clinical leads in the national TargettoB (T2B) consortium and principal investigator of the T2B-COVID study I have contributed to a large but flexible, and disease-overarching national clinical immunology consortium addressing clinically pressing questions such as immunity against COVID in patients with auto-immune diseases.