Kitty Verhoeckx PhD

Dr. Kitty Verhoeckx received her Bachelor’s degree in Analytical Chemistry in 1992. In 1991 she started her career at the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research TNO, where she had various research positions and was involved in various research topics (pesticides, hormones, and animal pharmaceuticals, analytics (targeted and untargeted proteomics, metabolomics), systems biology, bioactive lipids, etc. In November 2005 she gained her PhD degree at the University of Leiden on the topic: ”Systems biology-based studies on anti-inflammatory compounds”. Since January 2011, Kitty Verhoeckx is involved in food allergy projects (predicting allergenicity of novel proteins for instance insects, the effect of protein digestion, transport and processing on allergenicity, and biomarkers for food allergy to improve diagnosis). She was a management committee member of the COST Action INFOGEST (food digestion), participated in the ILSI Europe task force ‘Allergenicity and processing’, and was chair of the COST Action ImpARAS, a European network to improve the current risk assessment strategy of novel proteins. She was also a member of the EFSA focus group on food allergy. Currently, Kitty Verhoeckx is working as an assistant professor at the dermatology and allergology department of the University Medical Center Utrecht and is a management committee member of COMFA, a European network for the development of a core outcome set for measuring the effectiveness of immunotherapy for food allergy and a member of EFSA focus group on digestion in allergenicity and protein safety assessment.