Marieke Niesters (1984) studied Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) in the Netherlands. She obtained her PhD in the field of chronic pain on endogenous pain modulatory mechanisms at the Leiden University in 2014, after which she was trained as an anesthesiologist-pain specialist. Starting in 2018 she holds a position in the LUMC as staff member at the department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine and from 2020 onwards she is head of the LUMC pain clinic. At CHDR, Marieke works as Research Director pain. Her research focusses on drug development for the treatment of pain and effective methods to assess analgesic drug effect in both healthy volunteers and patients with chronic pain.Â