Dominique Baeten, M.D., Ph.D.
Dominique Baeten, M.D., Ph.D., is Associate Professor at the Department of Clinical Immunology and Rheumatology of the Academic Medical Center/University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He was trained as physician, specialist in internal medicine, and rheumatologist at the University of Ghent, Belgium. He obtained his Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences at the same university in 2001. After spending two years as a visiting scientist at the transplantation immunology laboratory of INSERM U643, Nantes, France, and at the Center for Neurological Diseases, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, he started his own research group in Amsterdam. His main interest is the immunopathology of inflammatory arthritis, with focus on rheumatoid arthritis and spondyloarthritis. This encompassess histopathology and immunomonitoring of human samples obtained during targeted therapies as well as more basic immunological work in vitro and in animal models.
Yiping Zhang, M.D., Ph.D., is Associate Professor at the Department of Neurology of the University of California at Irvine. He obtained his M.D. from The Medical College, Shanghai First Medical University (now Fudan University) Shanghai, China. After finishing his post graduate trainings in Max-Planck Society, Clinical Research Institute for Multiple Sclerosis, Würzburg, Germany, and Service de Neurobiologie, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois, Lausanne, Switzerland, he joined the Department of Neruroimmunology, Max-Planck Institute for Psychiatry, Martinsried/Munich, Germany, as Research Scientist. Then he worked in Joint Disease Laboratory, Shriner's Hospital for Children, Montreal, Quebec, Canada as Associate Professor, Department of Surgery, McGill University. Dr. Zhang's Research interests are regulatory T and B lymphocyte interaction and immunotherapy in autoimmune diseases. His research is focused on multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and spondyloarthropathy, in particular. He has large expertise in biomolecular and antibody work in the area of B cell biology.
Sophie Brouard, Ph.D., is First Rank Researcher of the CNRS (Centre National pour la Recherche Scientifique) working at the INSERM U643 laboratory in Nantes, France. She has been trained at the National Veterinary School of Nantes and subsequently as a transplantation immunologist at the largest kidney transplantation centre in Europe, in Nantes, France. After obtaining her Ph.D. degree in immunology, she spend two years in the Immunobiology Center of the Harvard Medical School Hospital, Boston, where she studied molecular biology. Over the last 4 years, she co-directed with Professor Soulillou a team of 10 researchers (1 post-doc, 6 Ph.D. students, 3 technicians) that studies the role of lymphocytes in transplantation tolerance in humans, as well as in animal models. She developed an innovative technique to analyse T cell clonality in blood and tissue samples, including human synovial tissue biopsies, and has a large expertise in antibody-mediated pathology in graft rejection.
