When Roy van der Meel, assistant professor of Precision Medicine at TU/e’s Biomedical Engineering department, arrived home from work on the day of the lockdown, his wife surprised him with a positive pregnancy test.

Due to corona, Roy had to sit in the waiting room when he and his wife Anna went to the obstetrician for their first ultrasound. “At a certain moment the obstetrician waived to me: “Mister Van der Meel, you should see this!” It turned out that Anna was pregnant with twins, expected to be born around October.

That immediately explained why Anna suffered from unusually severe nausea during her pregnancy. “And then it became clear that there was a positive side as well to being forced to work from home,” Roy says smiling, as he puts everything into perspective, “because now I was able to support Anna when she withdrew to the smallest room of the house for activities I won’t share with the readers.” By now, the expectant mother is doing slightly better. “2020 will go down as a unique year for us, that’s for sure,” Roy says with pride from behind his laptop.

Teaching from home

Roy doesn’t plan his days much differently now that he’s working from home. “I’m certainly not less busy; I submit research proposals, write papers, supervise students. All of that continues, only online.”

He currently spends much of his time teaching. The basis for this is the research conducted in the Precision Medicine group, where he started in January 2019. “Our expertise lies in the development of immune therapies based on nanomedicines. Group leader Willem Mulder and I set up a new course together that covers the entire cycle of nanomedicine development. The first part is about the basis, the building blocks and self-assembly process, analysis techniques, preclinical development, but also about diagnostic and therapeutic applications. We also focus on upscaling and producing nanomedicines and the eventual translation into actual drugs. Entrepreneurship is something we address as well.”

Online advantages

For practical reasons, the course was supposed to be taught to a maximum of 25 students. When corona arrived on the scene, everything suddenly needed to take place online. “Many students who were supposed to travel abroad for an internship or for their graduation asked whether they could take this course, because they had to stay here anyway. Eventually we ended up with sixty students. That means there’s more work for us to do because we have to evaluate more, but we want to support students as best we can,” Roy says enthusiastically.

And even though recording a lecture in front of an empty lecture hall feels very strange, Roy also sees the advantages of online teaching. “It’s much easier for students to give feedback via Teams, so it becomes very easy to make changes during the course. That is why teaching this course is a steep but excellent learning curve.”

Back to the lab

His group’s research was suspended for some time due to the corona crisis, but has by now started again. Since the labs carefully reopened in early May for PhD candidates and postdocs, Roy can be found in Helix every Thursday as responsible staff member. “I’m available for questions or unforeseen calamities. In the meantime, I can work on my own research, write papers, or teach courses online.”