I am a graduate of ETH Zürich and started at the NKI in March 2025 as a PhD student. My Bachelor’s degree at ETH in Interdisciplinary Sciences allowed me to explore the intersections of biology, chemistry, and computer science, followed by a Master’s focused on computational drug design, functional genomics, and bioinformatics. As part of my Master’s, I spent 6 months in a research group at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, where I gained further insights into the role of immune cells in cancer progression and identified a targetable tumor-macrophage interaction using single-nuclei RNA sequencing data.
I feel privileged to have joined the AI for Oncology group at the NKI, where I will be focusing on research into neoadjuvant immunotherapy in melanoma patients in collaboration with the groups of Jonas Teuwen (AI for Oncology), Lodewyk Wessels (Computational Cancer Biology), and Christian Blank (Molecular Oncology and Immunology). My research will aim to contribute to predicting patient response and toxicity to neoadjuvant immunotherapy in melanoma. By integrating multimodal data—including histopathology, spatial transcriptomics, and genomics—we aim to improve treatment stratification and clinical decision-making, contributing to the optimisation of immunotherapy strategies for melanoma patients.