Brief summary of your research over the last five years

After obtaining my PhD, I joined the laboratory of Prof. Palese at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, one of the world’s leading laboratories for influenza research. I worked on the production and characterization of broadly neutralizing antibodies and the development of a universal influenza vaccine, able to elicit such broadly reactive antibodies. My work at the Palese laboratory yielded several papers on influenza vaccines as primary or co-author and a co-inventorship of a patent on universal influenza vaccines.

As the evolution and diversity of seasonal and zoonotic influenza strains have always fascinated me, I was fortunate to join the laboratory of Prof. Menno de Jong at the Department of Medical Microbiology of the AMC Amsterdam in 2014. The clinical expertise and the close collaborations with NIHRD in Indonesia and the OUCRU/HTD in Vietnam, provided me with excellent opportunities to further develop myself towards being an independent scientist by using my background in molecular virology to address clinically and epidemiologically relevant questions pertaining to zoonotic influenza, in particular HPAI H5N1.

After considerable effort to establish collaborations and sequencing and bioinformatic pipelines, several papers have recently been submitted which describe the genetic and antigenic characterization of Indonesian HPAI H5N1 viruses isolated since 2008, the genetic diversity and evolution of avian H5N1 influenza viruses during human infection, and the viral factors associated with high mortality of human H5N1 infections in Indonesia. We are currently characteriztaion this genetic diversity and the effect of specific substitutions on HA-receptor interactions, polymerase activty and viral fitness related to posisble human adaptation of avian influenza.