Professor Joost Wiersinga

Professor Joost Wiersinga, MD, PhD, Amsterdam, the Netherlands is chair of the Division of Infectious Diseases of the Academic Medical Center, University of Amsterdam.

He received his medical training at the University of Amsterdam with additional courses at the Mayo Clinic (Rochester, Minnesota) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH, Bethesda, MD). He received his PhD thesis on the subject of the Toll-like receptors in the host defense against Gram-negative sepsis, cum laude (Professor Tom van der Poll and professor Sharon Peacock); during this period he worked in Bangkok at the Wellcome Trust Overseas Programme. Previous awards included the O'Callaghan PhD award, the Andreas Bonn medallion, the GSK ICAAC award, the ESCMID Young Investigator Award and the ANZICS Global Rising Star Award 2015.

He divides his time between patient care, teaching and research in the Center for Experimental Molecular Medicine (CEMM) all at the Academic Medical Center, Amsterdam.

He investigates innate immune responses in sepsis, caused by Streptococcus pneumonia, Klebsiella pneumonia, and Salmonella typhi. Recent interests include the role of the gut microbiota during severe bacterial infections. Wiersinga serves as coordinator of the H2020 Marie Curie ITN European Sepsis Academy and is part of the Surviving Sepsis Campaign guideline committee. He is executive member of the ESCMID study group on bloodstream infections and sepsis as well as the International Sepsis Forum (ISF). His work has been published in among others JAMA Internal Medicine, Nat Rev Microbiol, Gut, Cell Host Microbe, PLoS Medicine and N Engl J Med.