Marthe Walvoort

After obtaining her MSc degree in Chemistry at the Leiden University, Prof. Marthe Walvoort did a research internship in the glycoscience group of Prof. Ben Davis at the University of Oxford. Intrigued by the complex world of carbohydrates, she returned to Leiden University for her PhD studies with Prof. Hermen Overkleeft and Prof. Gijs van der Marel in the field of carbohydrate chemistry. Her research included the investigation of the mechanism of glycosylation of mannuronic acids, and she led the automated synthesis of β-mannuronic acid alginates and hyaluronan using a second-generation solid-phase oligosaccharide synthesizer. She obtained the PhD degree cum laude.

She joined the glycobiology lab of Prof. Barbara Imperiali at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, USA) as a postdoc associate. There she led the development of phosphoglycosyltransferase inhibitors inspired by nucleoside antibiotics, and was involved in a collaborative effort to link a bacterial infection to biomarkers in multiple sclerosis by producing N-linked glycoproteins.

At the University of Groningen, her research focuses on the synthesis of complex oligosaccharides and glycoconjugates from human and bacterial origin using chemistry and biology.