Joleen Masschelein

Laboratory for Biomolecular Discovery & Engineering,  Department of Biology, KU Leuven, Belgium. 

BioSketch

Joleen Masschelein obtained her PhD in Bioscience Engineering – Cell and Gene Technology in 2015 at KU Leuven. She was subsequently awarded a Marie-Sklodowska Curie Individual Fellowship from the European Commission to join the group of Prof. Greg Challis in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Warwick. In 2017, she moved to the Laboratory for Medicinal Chemistry at KU Leuven as a postdoctoral research fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders. In 2020, she was appointed as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Biology at KU Leuven and as a Group Leader at the VIB-KU Leuven Center for Microbiology. In 2025, she was promoted to Associate Professor. She also holds a Visiting Professorship at the Tianjin Institute for Industrial Biotechnology in China. In 2023, she was awarded an ERC Starting Grant and in 2025 she won the EFMC Prize for a young Chemical Biologist/Medicinal Chemist in Academia. She currently leads a multidisciplinary team of 9 postdocs, 12 PhD students and 4 technicians focused on studying and engineering microbial secondary metabolism for therapeutic and agrochemical applications.

Presentation

Title: t.b.a.