Bart Jan Kullberg - Biography#

Bart-Jan Kullberg MD, PhD, FRCP, FIDSA was appointed as Professor of Medicine and Infectious Diseases, at the Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands in 2003. He is Chair of the training programme in infectious diseases at Radboud University.

Professor Kullberg obtained his MD from Leiden University, the Netherlands in 1982 and was trained in Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases in The Hague and at the Leiden University Hospital. In 1992 he received his PhD degree from Leiden University where his work concentrated on experimental studies on host resistance to Candida albicans infections.

His major areas of expertise and research are pathogenesis, immunogenetics, and antimicrobial therapy of invasive fungal infections, the pathogenesis and treatment of Lyme disease, and Antimicrobial Stewardship and treatment of complicated bacterial and fungal infections.

Professor Kullberg’s specialism lies in the area of treatment of invasive fungal infections, especially candidaemia and invasive candidiasis. He has served on the international guidelines committee for candidiasis (IDSA), the European guidelines committees for candidiasis and aspergillosis (ESCMID), and he chairs the Netherlands’ national fungal treatment guidelines committee. He also serves on the board of directors of the international Mycoses Study Group (MSG), the worldwide academic research organisation for diagnosis and treatment of invasive fungal infections. He has been involved as a principal investigator or board member of various clinical trials on antifungal therapy. His authority in this area has been recognised by invited review papers in the New England Journal of Medicine and Nature reviews Disease Primers.

He is an international expert on pathogenesis and treatment of Lyme disease, in particular chronic complications and persistent symptoms attributed to Lyme disease. He has been the principal investigator of the world’s largest randomised clinical trial on prolonged antibiotic treatment of persistent Lyme-attributed symptoms, published in New England Journal of Medicine. He has been the founder of the Netherlands Centre of Expertise on Lyme Disease, an academic research, education and patient care consortium, which conducts large epidemiological, clinical and molecular studies on pathogenesis and treatment of Lyme disease.

Professor Kullberg has served on the executive board of the national Working Party on Antibiotic Policy (SWAB), the collaborative professional body for antimicrobial stewardship and prevention of antimicrobial resistance. He has chaired the national evidence-based guidelines program for antimicrobial therapy of infectious diseases in the Netherlands. Recently, he has established the nationwide program on antimicrobial stewardship in all hospitals in the Netherlands, and chairs the national multidisciplinary Antimicrobial Stewardship committee. He has conducted studies on the methods and evidence of antimicrobial stewardship interventions, e.g., published in The Lancet infectious diseases, and was an investigator in the EU/EFPIA Innovative Medicines Initiative project on responsible antibiotic use (Drive-AB).

He has been appointed as a member of the Health Council of the Netherlands in 2015.