Suzan Dijkstra, MD, is a research fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, USA, studying T-cell responses to viral infections.
Suzan studied medicine at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and worked as a postgraduate intern in Internal Medicine. During her studies and clinical work, she developed a special interest in the interplay between viral infections and immunology, conducting several research projects in this field under the guidance of the Infectious Diseases departments at the University Medical Center Utrecht, the Netherlands, and Massachusetts General Hospital, USA (resp. supervision B.J. van Welzen and G.M. Lauer).
Since 2021, she works as a research fellow in the Lauer-Kim Laboratory of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, where she focuses on HCV- and HBV-specific CD4+ T cells after natural infection or (trial) vaccination, as well as the impact of immune checkpoint inhibition on virus-specific T cells. Suzan studies human T cells in different viral infections and outcomes using high-dimensional flow cytometry, single-cell RNA-seq, and TCR-seq to better define the characteristics of protective T-cell immunity against viruses in general and against specific viral epitopes that could be targeted with (therapeutic) vaccines. Her projects are aimed at contributing to the development of new prophylactic vaccines and immunotherapies providing (at least functional) cure to chronic viral infections. She is concurrently pursuing her PhD on this topic at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands (supervision D. van Baarle).
