In the winter, you will find me indoors, doing yoga and other workouts, or being creative. I am also a hard-core Pinterest lover and DIYer. When temperature rises, you will find me outdoors because I love our beautiful planet and especially the animals that live on it. Therefore, it was not a difficult choice for me to study Animal Sciences at Wageningen University. For my masters, I specialised in veterinary epidemiology and disease ecology and became mainly interested in zoonotic and vector-borne diseases. I was very thankful to be given the opportunity to go to South Africa for my first thesis project, where we determined, measured and analysed environmental factors that influence vectors and their hosts. For my second thesis I went to Finland; there, I looked at the influence of predation risk on the immune system of bank voles.

After graduating, I wanted to continue working in the fields of ecology and epidemiology. I am excited that I am now accepted for a PhD position that combines both. I feel like a PhD will help me become more of an expert in the field but also improve my skills as a researcher. In this project I’m hoping we will collectively succeed at the monitoring, prevention and control of vector-borne diseases, as these become more of a threat due to a changing climate.