Emeritus Professor of Medicine. Radboud University Nijmegen
President of the European Academies Science Advisory Council (EASAC)

My main research interest is the host defence against infection, more specifically innate immunity and the inflammatory response. Recently we have proposed a new paradigm in immunology, i.e., trained immunity. Another area of interest is antimicrobial resistance and its consequences for human health.

After my graduation as an MD from Leiden University (1971), I became an internist (1976) and did a subspecialty training in Infectious Disease. After my PhD defence (Leiden,1982), I did a postdoctoral training at Tufts New England Medical Center in Boston with Charles Dinarello (1984 & 1987).

In 1988 I was appointed Professor of Medicine at Radboud University Medical Centre Nijmegen, where I became head of the Dept of Internal medicine (1992 - 2012).

I became a honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (London) in 1997 and a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh in 2006. in 2003 I was elected as a Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), of which I served as vice-president between 2005 - 2011.

In 2009 I was elected as Member of the Academia Europaea. Between 2008 and 2014 I served as one of the vice-presidents of the European Academies Science Advisory Council (EASAC), of which I became president in 2014.

Currently I am a Member of the Kingdom of the Netherlands Board for Scientific Integrity (LOWI)

I received several prizes and awards, the most prestigious being Knighthood in the Order of the Netherlands Lion (2003) and the Gold Hijmans van den Bergh medal in Internal Medicine (2011). I (co-)authored more than 875 peer reviewed papers, resulting in an H index of >80.