Kristiaan Wouters

Associate professor

Dr Kristiaan Wouters has studied Biomedical Sciences at Hasselt University (Belgium). In 2003, he started his PhD research at the Dept. of Molecular Genetics at Maastricht University on the role of macrophages and inflammation in nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. After obtaining his PhD in 2008, he worked as a post-doc in the laboratory of Prof. Bart Staels at the Pasteur Institute in Lille, France, on the role of macrophage polarisation in obesity, diabetes, and atherosclerosis. Kristiaan has returned to Maastricht at the Dept. of Internal Medicine as tenure track researcher setting up his research group 'Translational Immunometabolism'. Since 2019, he has been appointed as Associate Professor.

The group focusses on the immunological events in adipose tissue during obesity and the impact of these events on cardiometabolic complications, such as type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, with a specific focus on the interplay between metabolism and inflammation in innate immune cells.

Current projects focus on the role of reactive dicarbonyls formed during glycolysis on immune cell function in cardiometabolic diseases, and on multivariate analysis of flow cytometry data.