Prof. Dr. Kerensa Broersen is working in the Applied Stem Cell Technologies group as an associate professor where she is head of a subgroup of researchers interested in the molecular aspects of the microbiome-intestine-brain connection. She was trained as a biochemist and obtained a PhD in food chemistry from Wageningen University in The Netherlands. After this she moved to the Medical Research Council – Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, to work for two years as a postdoc with Bazbek Davletov and Michel Goedert on the aggregation of alpha-synuclein, a protein involved in Parkinson’s disease. After this, she worked for three and a half years, first as a postdoc, later as an assistant professor after obtaining an FWO Odysseus research award, in the Switch Laboratory, headed by Frederic Rousseau and Joost Schymkowitz, at the Free University of Brussels (VUB) and Flanders Institute for Biotechnology (VIB). Since 2011, she worked in the Nanobiophysics Group at the Science and Technology faculty at the University of Twente. This group was first headed by Vinod Subramaniam and since 2013 by Mireille Claessens. In 2018 she was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to facilitate a 6-month sabbatical research-stay in the laboratory of Randy Schekman, Nobel laureate at the University of California – Berkeley. Here, she investigated non-conventional secretion pathways of Alzheimer-implicated tau protein from neuronal cells. Since 2019, she is a member of the Applied Stem Cell Technologies group headed by Robert Passier. Her current work is financially supported by grants from Alzheimer Nederland and an NWO Vici award.