Joleen Masschelein leads the Laboratory for Biomolecular Discovery and Engineering at the VIB-KU Leuven Center for Microbiology in Belgium. She studied Bioscience Engineering at KU Leuven, where she earned her PhD in 2015, focusing on the discovery and characterization of novel antibiotics. She was subsequently awarded a Marie-Sklodowska Curie Individual Fellowship from the European Commission to continue her research at the Department of Chemistry at the University of Warwick. In 2017, she moved to the Laboratory for Medicinal Chemistry at KU Leuven as a postdoctoral research fellow of the Research Foundation – Flanders. In 2020, she was appointed as a Group Leader at the VIB-KU Leuven Center for Microbiology and as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Biology at KU Leuven. She holds an ERC Starting Grant and was recently awarded the 2025 EFMC Prize for a Young Medicinal Chemist or Chemical Biologist in Academia. She currently leads a multidisciplinary team of 7 postdocs, 13 PhD students and 4 technicians focusing on diverse aspects of microbiome biosynthetic engineering.