Hedwich F. Kuipers

Dept. of Clinical Neurosciences
University of Calgary – Cumming School of Medicine

Dr. Kuipers received her MSc in Biopharmaceutical Sciences and her PhD in Immunology (cum laude) at Leiden University in the Netherlands. After this, she moved to Stanford University to do neuroimmunology research as a postdoctoral scholar in the lab of Dr. Lawrence Steinman and continued to study extracellular matrix immunology in the lab of Dr. Paul Bollyky as a research scientist. In April 2018 she joined the Departments of Clinical Neurosciences and Cell Biology & Anatomy of the University of Calgary as an Assistant Professor of Neuroimmunology. She is a member of both the Hotchkiss Brain Institute and the Snyder Institute for Chronic Diseases.

Dr. Kuipers’ 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 its resident cells. Her main focus is on how astrocytes regulate inflammatory responses. She has shown before that these cells, which are highly abundant in the brain, can release factors that help immune cells infiltrate into CNS tissue. She currently investigates how astrocytes interact with these immune cells and shape their responses, and the microenvironmental factors involved in these interactions, using molecular and cell biology approaches, as well as in vivo models of MS.