Dr. Kuipers received her MSc in Biopharmaceutical Sciences and her PhD in Immunology at Leiden University in the Netherlands. After this, she moved to Stanford University to perform neuroimmunology research as a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Dr. Lawrence Steinman. At Stanford, she continued to study how the components in between cells (extracellular matrix) affects immune responses, in the lab of Dr. Paul Bollyky. In April 2018 she joined the Department of Clinical Neurosciences and the Hotchkiss Brain Institute at the University of Calgary as an AssistantProfessor of Neuroimmunology.

Dr. Kuipers’s research centers on neuroinflammatory diseases such as multiple sclerosis (MS) and tries to understand the interaction between immune cells entering the central nervous system (CNS) and the cells that reside there. Her main focus is on how astrocytes, one of the main non-nerve cell types in the CNS, regulate inflammatory responses. She has shown before that these cells can release factors that help immune cells infiltrate into CNS tissue. She currently investigates how astrocytes interact with these immune cells and affect their responses, using molecular and cell biology approaches, as well as models ofMS.

Dr. Kuipers always enjoys “talking shop”with the MS community and explaining her research at events organized by the MSSociety of Canada or the AMSN. Outside of the laboratory, she likes to enjoy the outdoors with her family, either by foot or by bike. She’s an avid participant of the annual MS Walk (go, team UCalgary!) and the proud captain of the UCalgary/Hotchkiss Brain Institute MS Bike team (go, Myelin Spinners!).

‍