Dr. Rory D. de Vries, Department of Viroscience, Erasmus MC, Rotterdam, the Netherlands,

Dr. de Vries studies interactions between respiratory viruses and the host adaptive immune system at the Department of Viroscience (Erasmus MC, Rotterdam, the Netherlands). During his PhD, he unraveled how interactions between measles virus and the host partially depletes pre-existing immunological memory leading to immune amnesia. He employed this knowledge to virus-host interactions in the field of vaccination and established a research line on immune responses to influenza vaccination during his PostDoc. After a short visit to the La Jolla institute for Immunology in 2020, Dr. de Vries returned to the Erasmus MC and established multiple research lines on immunity to respiratory viruses. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Dr. de Vries started with studying virus-specific immune responses in ICU patients with COVID-19 and continued with studying vaccine responses in 2021 and 2022. He is currently part of 8 consortia studying vaccine immunogenicity in immunocompromised patients, and his team still works on evaluating the immune responses induced by (combinations of) different COVID-19 vaccines in healthy individuals. His long-term goal is to establish all techniques required to decipher immune responses to multiple respiratory viruses and determine specific ‘immune profiles’ required to be protected from respiratory virus infections.