Email: R.J.Pieters@uu.nl
Website: https://www.uu.nl/staff/RJPieters
Biographical sketch
Roland Pieters studied organic chemistry at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands (MSc. 1990) where he worked with Prof. Ben Feringa and also as an exchange student at Trinity University in San Antonio (USA). He completed his Ph.D. in supramolecular chemistry at MIT with Prof. Julius Rebek Jr. in 1995 and was an NWO Talent post-doctoral at the ETH-Zürich with Prof. Francois Diederich. After another post doctoral stay (University of Groningen) he joined Utrecht University as an assistant professor in 1998 and obtained a fellowship from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and coordinated the EU project POLYCARB. He became an associate professor in 2005, obtained a VICI grant in 2008, and was promoted to full professor in 2010.
His research interests at the department of Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery are focused on carbohydrate recognition. A main topic is the interference with protein-carbohydrate interactions. This is either done by using multivalent systems of varying architectures and by virtual screening of compound libraries. Targets include viral and bacterial adhesion proteins and toxins, galectins and glycosidases. Furthermore his group uses glyco- and peptide-microarrays in chemical biology and drug discovery e.g. on O-GlcNAcylation, and studies carbohydrate recognition with small (peptidic) molecules.
