Koert Stittelaar

Koert has a PhD in virology from the Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands (the renowned virologist professor Ab Osterhaus as promotor), where he worked (later also as post-doc) on vaccines against measles, HIV, dengue virus and mpox. He then worked for 16 years at Viroclinics Biosciences, a CRO where he was director of preclinical virology and later general manager of Xplore. He played a pivotal role as a scientist, team leader, and business developer, testing various countermeasures against influenza virus H5N1, pandemic H1N1 for many different small to large biotech and pharmaceutical companies as well as collaborations with the WHO.

His work on MERS-CoV was instrumental in facilitating a rapid response to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. He was involved, responsible and the driving force behind a large-scale neurovirulence safety testing of the new poliovirus vaccine. At Wageningen University & Research he was head of the department Epidemiology, Bioinformatics and Animal Models, and worked with the Corporate Value Creation on valorization projects. He is (co-)author on publications in high impact journals such as Nature, PLOS pathogens and Science Translational Medicine.