Curriculum vitae

Saskia Marie-Claude Annick de Walick was born in 1981 in Voorburg, the Netherlands. After secondary school, she started her study medicine at the Leiden University. As an undergraduate student she did research at the Department of Parasitology of the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) under supervision of dr. L. van Lieshout and dr. J.J. Verweij. This project comprised epidemiology of diagnosed malaria cases in the LUMC as well as laboratory work on the development of a real-time PCR assay for the diagnosis of malaria and differentiation of Plasmodium spp. Still during her studies, she did an epidemiologic study on the relation between body height reduction as a measure of osteoporosis and bone fracture occurence in elderly people. This study was performed on the Leiden 85-plus Study data of prof.dr. R.G.J. Westendorp under his supervision (LUMC). For her master's thesis she went to the Immunology and Infection laboratory of dr. C.R. Engwerda at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research in Brisbane, Australia. Here, she investigated the role of dendritic cells in the development of experimental cerebral malaria. After acquiring her master's degree she started her PhD in 2008 at the Department of Medical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases of the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam under supervision of prof.dr. A.G.M. Tielens and dr. J.J. van Hellemond. The results of her work on Schistosoma mansoni and the interactions with the host are presented in this thesis.
She currently works on clinical trials at the Department of Hematology of the LUMC.