I completed my BSc. In Pharmaceutical Sciences at the VU Univeristy in Amsterdam in 2017. During my BSc I intered at the molecular and computational toxicology group of the VU and studied the inhibitory mechanism of a cytidine analog on DNA methyltransferase-1 using Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations. In 2017 I started two master programs in parallel, namely: Drug Discovery & Safety with a specialization in Computational Drug Design and the program Bioinformatics & Systems Biology with a major in Bioinformatics. During my masters I did an internship at a drug discovery company ZoBio in Leiden, where I focused on examining the effect of structural water molecules in docking software. Subsequently, I did an internship at the Bio2Byte group in Brussels, during which I tried to explain the difference in drug binding between two proteins (COX-1 and COX-2) by studying the differences in their biophysical characteristics. Additionally, I also used Artificial Intelligence (AI) during this internship to build a classifier that could predict binding to either of these COX proteins. In 2021 I started my PhD at the Computational Drug Discovery division of the LACDR under supervision of Prof. Van Westen and Dr. Lamers. My research focuses on computational modelling of antibiotic resistance in tuburcolosis. I will examine protein structures and use this structural information as a starting point for drug design.

Publications