Inge Mertens, PhD

Prof. I. Mertens is senior researcher and project manager in the Environmental Intelligence Unit at VITO. The 'Technologies for personalized prevention and therapy team’ holds all the different expertise that is needed to execute mass spectrometry-based shotgun and targeted proteomics, immunopeptidomics and mass spectrometry based imaging. Prof. Mertens obtained her PhD in Biochemistry at KULeuven in 2005. Since 2009, she has been a senior researcher in the proteomics team and in 2015, she was appointed part time research professor at UAntwerpen.

Prof. Mertens is a board member of the Belgian Society of Extracellular Vesicles (BESEV), part of the larger international ISEV. She is the co-author of over 50 peer reviewed publications (h-index of 23). She is the co-inventor of 3 patents (PCT/EP2018/097044, PCT/EP2024/069905 and EP25156917) and was very closely involved in the setup of the VITO spin off ImmuneSpec (official start March 2023).