Ronald van Rij - Biography#

Ronald van Rij has a long-standing interest in interactions between viruses and their hosts. As a PhD student at Sanquin Research / University of Amsterdam, he studied how the usage of different co-receptors by HIV-1 affects AIDS pathogenesis. As an EMBO long-term fellow at the University of California San Francisco, he pioneered the study of antiviral immunity in the model organism Drosophila melanogaster (fruit flies). There, he has found that the RNAi machinery is crucial for antiviral defense in insects. After a second postdoc at Hubrecht Institute, Utrecht, the Netherlands, studying microRNAs in C. elegans, he moved to an independent position at Radboud University Medical Center. Here, he has continued to work on small silencing RNAs and antiviral immunity in Drosophila, and more recently in the Aedes aegypti vector mosquito that transmit pathogenic viruses. To this end, an infrastructure was established to infect mosquitoes with biosafety level-3 pathogens. Research interests have expanded towards regulatory functions of a class of small RNAs, called PIWI-interacting RNAs. A translational research line is dedicated to the identification and characterization of antiviral compounds, using advanced infection models including Zika virus in iPSC-derived cellular models. During the COVID pandemic, his lab has participated in an international Open Science project, called COVID Moonshot, dedicated to the development of an antiviral drug against SARS-coronavirus-2. Prof. Van Rij has received prestigious national and international grants, including a VIDI and VICI grants of the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and a Consolidator Grant and a Proof-of-Concept Grant of the European Research Council (ERC). Prof. Van Rij teaches and coordinates courses on virology, non-coding RNA and innate immunity.

Full publication list
Validated peer-review record over the last 2-3 years