Company Position Country
TNO Principal Scientist, , Microbiology and Systems Biology The Netherlands
Session
Nutrition to boost the immune system: Recent trends of innovation including Covid-19 related solutions

Dr. Wopereis, principal scientist, joined TNO in 2006 and works with a systems biology research group active on the theme ‘quantification of health and effects of lifestyle on health’, acting as principal investigator in several public private partnerships focusing on systems health applying genomics technology, bioinformatics, and standardized infrastructures (PPP Personalized nutrition and health, PPP PhenFlex, PPP Resilience, PPP PROBE). She was involved in several EU projects focusing on systems health, coordinating data integration from different genomics platforms (FP6 Nutrigenomics Organisation (NuGO), FP7 Nutritech, FP7 BioClaims). Moreover, she is responsible for scientific contents in the TNO program on personalized health focusing on inflammatory resilience. In her 14 years of research at TNO, her main focus has been on phenotypic flexibility as a measure of health, where she uses standardized challenge tests to study the response of a multitude of biological processes to quantify resilience in health optimization and chronic lifestyle related diseases such as Diabetes Mellitus type II. On this topic she has >60 peer reviewed scientific publications (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Suzan_Wopereis/research), with a total H-index of 30. She coordinated the development of the standardized challenge called the PhenFlex test, which has been applied in several TNO coordinated human studies, as well as by other research groups all over the world (e.g. EWHA University (South-Korea), USDA (USA), University of East Anglia (UK)). Furthermore, she coordinated the evidence-based scientific advice system that has been implemented by the American personalized nutrition start-up company ‘Habit’ (https://habit.com/) that also applied the so-called Habit challenge beverage (based on PhenFlex challenge) in their Habit self-assessment kit. Suzan is internationally recognized as an expert in the area of personalized metabolic health. Suzan Wopereis is board member of the Dutch Innovation Center for Lifestyle 4 Health (lifestyle4health.nl/) with the mission to reduce the societal and economic impact of lifestyle related diseases in 10 years. Within Lifestyle4Health she coordinates the program line ‘bio-mechanisms’. In 2016 she was awarded the ‘Excellent researcher of 2015’ for her work on personalized nutrition. She has a PhD in medical sciences from Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Center (2006).