Yvonne Vercoulen is a principal investigator and associate professor at the Center for Molecular Medicine of the UMC Utrecht, and a member of the Utrecht Young Academy.
Throughout her career she has developed a fascination for immune regulation and aims to understand how errors result in tissue inflammation and cancer. She trained as a PhD student in T cell immune regulation at Utrecht University, and as a Marie-Curie international postdoctoral fellow in T cell receptor signal transduction at UC San Francisco.
Dr. Vercoulen’s team works at the interface of immunology and cancer to identify cellular and molecular underpinnings of disease using spatial omics technology. The lab asks fundamental questions to, for example, understand how immune cells contribute to cancer development, prognosis and therapy response.
The team has developed multiplex spatial analyses technology integrating microscopy with imaging mass cytometry and applies both protein and spatial RNA analyses to investigate the interplay between different cell types in the tissue. Studying tissue and intercellular communication in the tumor microenvironment is essential to understand the mechanisms of disease and therapy response. Dr. Vercoulen’s team collaborates closely with clinicians and researchers from multiple disciplines and strives to drive the field of spatial tissue biology forward and bring this to a level of clinical application.