Hello all!!

Welcome to a new blog. This time from me, Leanne van Leeuwen. In this blog I will tell you something about myself and my work at the Department of Viroscience of the Erasmus Medical Center.

In the midst of the first wave of the covid-19 pandemic, I started as a medical researcher at Viroscience here in Rotterdam. This was a really weird time to start this job. I didn’t had a lot of research experience yet. Before I started as a researcher I had mainly worked as a doctor in the cardiology and intensive care departments. Because I wanted to broaden my knowledge and build up new experiences, I applied for my current job before the COVID-19 crisis started. By then, no one knew what the world would look like a few months later

In my first weeks I mainly helped my colleagues with their studies on SARS-COV-2. Little was known about this virus at the time and the demand for information was high. After the first peak, I not only continued researching SARS-COV-2, but also other topics such as vaccination behavior (why do people want to be vaccinated or not) and the hepatitis B virus.

Besides my work as a medical researcher, I really enjoy sports. I play volleyball, tennis, boot camp, skiing and acrobatics. Unfortunately, many of these sports are not possible at the moment due to the local quarantine rules, but luckily YouTube contains a lot of inspiration for sports at home.