For the main part of her PhD she worked at the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School in Boston, supervised by Prof. Dr. Cox P Terhorst.
In 1987, she received a 5-year personal fellowship from The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research.
In 1992, she became staff scientist at the Netherlands Cancer Institute and was named the head of the Division of Immunology in 2002.
She received the Van Loghem career award from the Dutch Society of Immunology in 2009.
In 2018 she received the Delphine Parrott award for inspiring female scientists[5] by Megan MacLeod during the West of Scotland Immunology Group showcase at the University of Glasgow