Mihai NETEA

Mihai G. Netea (born 1968, Cluj-Napoca, Romania) is a Romanian-Dutch physician and professor at Radboud University Nijmegen, specialised in infectious disease, immunology, and global health.

Mihai Netea studied medicine at the Iuliu Hațieganu University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Cluj-Napoca. He received a doctoral degree in 1998 at Radboud University, with a thesis on the role of cytokines in sepsis, written under the direction of Jos van der Meer. He joined the University of Colorado as a postdoctoral researcher and then returned to conclude his clinical training as an infectious disease specialist. Since 2008, he has headed the division of Experimental Medicine (Department of Internal Medicine) at Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen.

Netea's field of study includes the innate immune system and its capacity to "memorise" infections, as well as its recognition of Fungi pathogens. He has examined the nervous system’s response to Candida albicans, a sepsis trigger. Additionally, he has carried out research into genetic diseases that can make individuals more vulnerable to this type of infection. Netea has co-published more than 1000 scientific papers in journals, such as the New England Journal of Medicine, Nature, Science, and PNAS.

For his academic work, Mihai Netea has received several grants: a Vidi grant in 2005, a Vici grant in 2010, and European Research Council Consolidator Grant in 2012. In 2016, he was awarded the Spinoza Prize. He has been a member of Academia Europaea since 2015 and of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2016.

Mihai Netea is known for the scientific breakthrough in the area of trained immunity - "Trained immunity: A program of innate immune memory in health and disease" (Science Mag.) Netea's research is working towards translating information obtained through the assessment of human genetic variation in patients into novel diagnostic and therapeutic approaches.