Veerle Baekelandt

Veerle is a professor in the Department of Neurosciences at the KU Leuven in Belgium. She has a PhD degree in neurobiology from the KU Leuven in 1995. During her PhD she obtained a Frank Boas Fulbright fellowship for a research visit in Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School. She was appointed as an assistant professor and head of the Laboratory for Neurobiology and Gene Therapy at the faculty of medicine at KU Leuven in 2003. In collaboration with the virologist Dr. Zeger Debyser, they were the first research groups to introduce viral vector technology in Belgium. She has acquired international recognition for the application of viral vectors in rodent brain to model and study PD and more recently for demonstrating a prion-like behaviour of the α-synuclein protein.