Jeroen Saeij

Jeroen Saeij

Principal Investigator · Professor, Department of Pathology, Microbiology & Immunology

Jeroen trained at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, where his PhD with Geert Wiegertjes examined the genetics of carp resistance to blood flagellates, and as a postdoctoral fellow with John Boothroyd at Stanford, where he showed that secreted rhoptry kinases explain strain differences in Toxoplasma virulence and host-cell modulation (Saeij et al., Science 2006; Nature 2007). He started his laboratory at MIT in 2007, was named a Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences in 2010, received tenure at MIT in 2014, and moved the lab to UC Davis in 2015.

The lab’s focus is how Toxoplasma’s secreted ROP and GRA effectors remodel the host cell, and which host genes determine susceptibility. Genome-wide CRISPR/Cas9 loss-of-function screens in the parasite, run in vivo and in naive or interferon-γ-stimulated rat, mouse and human cells, have become the lab’s main discovery engine.

He believes a lab with people from different backgrounds and countries is what keeps research innovative, and works to keep the lab open and inclusive: everyone excited about host–parasite interactions is welcome, regardless of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation or gender identity, age, physical ability, economic status, nationality or immigration status. Outside the lab he travels and hikes.