Amsterdam University Medical Center, The Netherlands
Marit van Gils is an Associate Professor in Virology at the Amsterdam University Medical Centers (UMC) in The Netherlands. Her laboratory is focused on understanding how vaccines work and characterizing how underlying immune responses contribute to vaccine effectiveness and protective efficacy. She is particularly interested in understanding how vaccines induce broadly protective antibodies against viral infections, including HIV, and more recently, coronaviruses. Marit studied medical pharmaceutical sciences at the University of Groningen and completed her PhD research and early postdoctoral research at the University of Amsterdam. She performed part of her postdoctoral research at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, USA. She subsequently started her own research group at the Amsterdam UMC as an Assistant Professor in 2017 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2019.
The van Gils laboratory uses a wide range of molecular, virological and immunological techniques to explore early interactions between vaccines and immune cells in lymphoid tissue. Her team has isolated and characterized several novel antibodies from humans, which have contributed to the identification of important antigenic epitopes on viral glycoproteins, including the HIV envelope, and spike of SARS-CoV-2. These discoveries have informed the design of next-generation broadly protective vaccines.