Tom Wennekes

Tom Wennekes is assistant professor at Utrecht University and heads the ‘Chemical Glycobiology’ research group within the Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery Department. He obtained his PhD degree in 2008 at Leiden University in the Bio-organic synthesis group of Hermen Overkleeft and afterwards became a post-doctoral fellow in the group of Steve Withers at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. In 2010, he returned to the Netherlands to start his own group as an assistant professor within the Laboratory of Organic Chemistry at Wageningen University and relocated his group to Utrecht University in 2016. His group combines organic synthesis and glycoscience to develop smart glycan-based chemical probes that are used to illuminate and perturb the role of glycans, glycosidases and glycosyltransferases in healthy and pathological microbial host-guest interactions.