Evelien Van Hamme leads the Spatial Catalyst team in VIB. She obtained her PhD in 2009 at the university of Ghent studying viral entry of coronaviruses in monocytes. She has 12 years of experience in advanced bio imaging applications such as live cell imaging, functional imaging and CLEM workflows. In 2018 her interest in spatial technologies was raised when she started evaluating the Akoya CODEX technology. Since 2023 she focuses on spatial technology applications in life science research together with a team of data analysts.

After her PhD at the Max Planck Insititut for Plant Breeding Research (Germany) on the transcriptional responses during plant microbe interactions, she went to the Plant Science Center in Umea (Sweden), to study wood development. Since 2020, Carolin is coordinator of the plant single cell platform – a service platform that evaluates novel technologies around single cell omics for plants.

 Isabelle did a PhD in the KULeuven lab of Neuroplasticity and Neuroproteomics. To learn more about single cell technologies, she started a Postdoc in the VIB-VUB lab of Myeloid Cell Immunology where she performed the wetlab and analysis of scRNA-Seq on mouse models for Alzheimers Disease, in collaboration with Janssen Pharmaceutica. 

Since May 2022, she started a new position in the VIB-KULeuven Center for Cancer Biology (CCB) to dive deeper into the spatial dimension. She became part of the new Single Cell & Spatial Multiomics expertise center to develop, optimize and implement novel spatial and high-plex -omics technologies. 

Lars Borm joined VIB as a postdoc in the lab of Stein Aerts. For his PhD he worked on developing new spatial transcriptomics methods. These were used to study the cellular organization of tissues with a focus on the mouse and human (developing) brain. Now he switched organisms to study the cellular architecture of the developing Drosophila melanogaster.

Mélanie Planque is the head of the Spatial Metabolomics Expertise Center at VIB Center for Cancer Biology. After her PhD in proteomics at the University of Namur, she joined the VIB Laboratory of Cellular Metabolism and Metabolic Regulation as a mass spectrometry and metabolomics expert. Since 2023, she works in the Spatial Metabolomics Expertise Center and she collaborates with scientists to support biological, pharmaceutical, and medical fields in their research.