Senior Staff

Prof. Dr. Herman Goossens graduated as a medical doctor in 1982 at the Free University of Brussels. He is Emeritus Professor of Microbiology at the UA and Director of the Dept. of Clinical Pathology of the University Hospital, Antwerp. Prof. Dr. Goossens holds several expert positions in Belgium, the EU, the US, and the WHO. Prof. Dr. Goossens has more than 800 papers published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Prof. Dr. Goossens was elected chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Joint Programming Initiative on Antimicrobial Resistance. He is the initiator of the annual European Antibiotic Awareness Day. With his translational research, he seeks to enhance the standard of healthcare quality, public health and professional standards. Prof. Dr. Goossens is a popular resource person and opinion leader, much sought after by local and international media for views on matters related to public health and infectious diseases.

Office: S6.23
E-mail: herman.goossens@uza.be
Tel.: +32 3 265 27 51

Prof. Dr. Surbhi Malhotra-Kumar is a clinical and molecular microbiologist, actively involved in the development of high-throughput and point of care diagnostic assays for hospital and community pathogens. Using state-of-the-art molecular techniques, she is studying the impact of antibiotic use at the individual level and the role of virulence factors in biofilm formation as well as utilising metagenomics to study bacterial pathogenetic mechanisms and antibiotic resistance.

Office: S6.23
E-mail: surbhi.malhotra@uantwerpen.be
Tel.: +32 3 265 27 52

Prof. Dr. Ir. Sandra Van Puyvelde joined the Laboratory of Medical Microbiology at UA as an Assistant Professor in 2019, which she combines with a research appointment at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp. She obtained her MSc and PhD degree in Bioscience Engineering at the University of Leuven. During her PhD research she studied Salmonella Typhimurium gene regulation during biofilm formation. After her PhD she obtained an advanced MSc in Statistical Data Analysis at the University of Gent and started as a research fellow at the Institute of Tropical Medicine thereby studying the genomics of Salmonella causing bloodstream infections in Africa. She is a visiting researcher at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge and Cambridge University since 2015 and 2018 respectively. In her research, Prof. Sandra Van Puyvelde combines wet-lab and bioinformatics to understand bacterial pathogens and their resistance to antibiotics. 

Office: S6.24
E-mail: Sandra.VanPuyvelde@uantwerpen.be

Prof. Dr. Greet Ieven is a medical microbiologist and emeritus professor at the University of Antwerp. She has been responsible for the clinical diagnostic laboratory at the Antwerp University Hospital (UZA) until August 2016. Professor Ieven has been involved from the beginning in a number of European projects at the Laboratory of Medical Microbiology, such as GRACE and PREPARE. Her main focus is molecular detection of respiratory pathogens. She has long standing experience with the development and implementation of both conventional and molecular diagnostic tests in the clinical microbiology laboratory.

Office: S6.24
E-mail: greet.ieven@uza.be

Prof. Dr. Samuel Coenen graduated as a medical doctor in 1997 from the University of Antwerp. He was granted pre and post-doctoral Fellowships by the Research Foundation-Flanders (FWO) for the improvement of the management and the multidisciplinary study of infectious diseases, with particular focus on respiratory infections in primary care in the context of antimicrobial resistance.

Office: D.R.309 
E-mail: samuel.coenen@uantwerpen.be
Tel.: +32 3 265 25 25

Prof. Samir Kumar-Singh is a certified medical doctor with a doctorate in Pathology and a Master degree in Laboratory Animals. He is a full-time research professor of Molecular Pathology at the Faculty of Medicine–Cell Biology & Histology at the University of Antwerp and is affiliated to the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Institute. He has published a well-cited body of work on molecular pathology of cancer and neurodegeneration involving patient studies and mouse modeling. Prof. Kumar-Singh serves on several review boards and international consortia. Relevant to the research performed at Vaccine and Infectious Disease Institute, his group is engaged in studying the pathomechanism of hospital acquired pneumonia especially ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) and has developed an authentic rat VAP model and several acute and chronic rat/mouse pneumonia models to study disease pathogenesis and for biomarker discovery.

Office: G.U.101b 
E-mail: samir.kumarsingh@uantwerpen.be
Tel.: +32 3 265 33 29

Gérald Glupczynski is an emeritus Professor of medical microbiology of the Université Catholique de Louvain. He has an expertise in the epidemiology and mechanisms of resistance in Gram-negative pathogens. He joined the LAB-Net team in 2019. He assists in the data analysis and reporting of EQA results, supports the laboratory aspects within the clinical protocol and studies, and collaborates on LAB-Net’s newsletter.

E-mail: Gerald.Glupczynski@uantwerpen.be​