Quinten is a postdoctoral researcher in the group since July 2022 and was previously a visiting PhD student (February - June 2021). He obtained a pre-med and Biomedical sciences BSc at University College Roosevelt (Middelburg, the Netherlands) and an MSc in Nutritional Physiology from Wageningen University & Research (Wageningen, the Netherlands). After working shortly in the Microbiology & Systems Biology department of TNO, he started his PhD in January 2018 (graduated in March 2022) at Leiden University Medical Center under supervision of Prof. Ed Kuijper. The focus of his PhD was on microbiome-mediated colonization resistance and generally on understanding the interplay between the gut microbiome and infectious disease.
His current projects in the group involve development of Cayman and large-scale (meta)genomic analyses of CAZymes, analyzing data of nutritional interventions with a specific focus on fasting and caloric restriction and advancing functional metagenomic analyses in the lab in a variety of disease settings, such as colorectal cancer. In general, Quinten has a very broad interest ranging from the interplay between nutrition/gut microbiome to ameliorate intestinal diseases to functional metagenomics and fundamentals of bacterial infections.