Dr. Jolien Wolbert obtained her BSc and MSc in Bio-Pharmaceutical Sciences at Leiden University. During her internship in the lab of Prof. Dr. John Anderson at the UCL Institute of Child Health in London, she characterized the immune microenvironment of pediatric neuroblastoma.

In 2017, she started her PhD in the lab of Prof. Dr. Gerd Meyer zu Hörste at the University Hospital Münster, where she applied single-cell RNA sequencing to unravel immune complexity within the nervous system. This work reshaped prevailing views on CNS immune surveillance. As a postdoctoral researcher in the same lab, she translated these findings to human neuropathies by developing transcriptomic protocols, building patient databases, and generating patent-pending results.

Since January 2026, Jolien has been part of the team of Prof. Dr. Kerensa Broersen at Applied Stem Cell Technologies (AST). Her current work, funded by an NWO-Veni grant, focuses on implementing organ-on-chip technology to study Parkinson’s disease pathology, with particular emphasis on gut-to-brain disease transmission using single-cell transcriptomics.