Kimberly Martinod

Kimberly Martinod is an assistant professor in the Department of Cardiovascular Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, at KU Leuven in Belgium.  She performed her doctoral studies in Denisa Wagner’s lab and received her PhD degree in Immunology from Harvard Medical School for her thesis titled “Neutrophil extracellular traps in thrombosis and inflammation.” As a Transfusion Biology Research Fellow at Boston Children’s Hospital, she investigated the role of peptidylarginine deiminase 4 (PAD4) and NETs in fibrotic tissue remodeling during aging. In 2016, she joined Simon De Meyer’s group in the Laboratory for Thrombosis Research at the KU Leuven Kulak Kortrijk campus, where as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow she has studied the interaction between the blood protein von Willebrand factor and neutrophils in their activation leading to NETosis.

Her (growing) research group, located at the Center for Molecular and Vascular Biology in Leuven, focuses on the interplay between thrombosis and inflammation in cardiac disease, specifically in the development of heart failure.  She is, since 2018, a co-chair of the Scientific Subcommittee on Vascular Biology of the International Society on Thrombosis and Haemostasis.