Lieve Temmerman

Post doc

Dr Lieve Temmerman graduated Master in Biomedical Sciences at the KU Leuven (Belgium) in 2005. She was selected for a PhD at the EMBL (European Molecular Biology Laboratory) Mouse Biology Unit with Prof. Dr. Nadia Rosenthal. Her work focussed on the possibly differential role of several isoforms of insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1), where she created and studied severel IGF-1 isoform knockout mice.

In April 2011, she joined the group of Prof. Erik Biessen at Maastricht University. Her first years as a post-doc focussed on the role of antigen presenting cells (DC subsets and macrophages) in mouse models of atherosclerosis. In 2015-2016 she received a grant from the UM board to co-manage eNovum, a University-wide initiative to spearhead e-innovations at the UM. Since 2017, she is again dedicating her time to research, now leading the high content analysis cluster in Prof. Biessen's group.

Our current research centres on macrophages, and how we can better understand and potentially manipulate their plasticity in a cardiovascular disease context. We have developed a high content analysis platform based on automated fluorescent microscopy, which enables us to get a full functional profile of macrophage activation. Combined with machine learning techniques, transcriptomics, and through close collaboration with clinicians, we are able to map the response of macrophages to patient material, compounds and materials. Ongoing projects are studying the effect of pre-eclampsia in the development of left ventricular diastolic dysfunction (part of the Queen of Hearts Study, Dutch Heart Foundation), stratifying cardiovascular risk in the obese population (STW project), characterizing cardiovascular patient monocytes, mapping a functional response to biomaterials (collaboration with DSM).