Dr Carolien van de Sandt is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the Peter Doherty Institute, University of Melbourne (UoM). Her principal area of expertise is in viral and aging immunology.

Carolien completed her PhD in 2016 at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam (Netherlands) where she investigated the longevity, cross-reactivity and immune evasion strategies of influenza-specific CD8 + T- cells, followed by two years of postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Profs Rimmelzwaan and Osterhaus.

In 2018, she was awarded the prestigious European Marie Sklodowska-Curie Action (MSCA) Fellowship and the University of Melbourne’s McKenzie Fellowship to join the Kedzierska laboratory, where she leads the Aging Immunity Research Program which aims to unravel the mechanisms that underly gain- and-loss- of CD8 + T-cell function across human lifespan.

During the pandemic Carolien temporarily relocated to the Netherlands as part of her MSCA fellowship (2020-2021) where she led her own research team at Sanquin Research studying SARS-CoV-2 immunity in healthy and autoimmune patients. In 2022 she was awarded the ARC-DECRA fellowship to continue her Aging Immunity and T-cell Development Research at the University of Melbourne.

Carolien has >50 publications including in leading scientific journals like Nature Medicine, Immunity, Nature Immunology and Nature Communications. The importance of her work has been recognized by 16 Awards including the Viruses Early Career Investigator Award.