Louis Bont

Louis Bont is a Paediatrician Infectiologist at the Wilhelmina Children’s Hospital in the University Medical Center Utrecht, The Netherlands. He leads the Utrecht RSV Research Group. He is the coordinator of the Interest Group on Respiratory Infections of the European Society of Pediatric Infectious Diseases (ESPID) Research Committee. Dr. Bont is the founder and chairman of ReSViNET, an international RSV Research consortium. He has a strong interest in education of young talented researchers and founded the successful Training of Upcoming Leaders in Pediatric Science (TULIPS) career training program in the Netherlands. Dr. Bont served as advisor of the World Health Organization (WHO), the European Center of Disease Control (ECDC) and the Europarliament.

Louis Bont did his medical training at the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam (1989-1996). He performed his PhD under the supervision of professor Jan Kimpen and professor Cobi Heijnen at the Wilhelmina Children’s Hospital (1997-2000). He was a post-doc at the Garofalo lab in Galveston, Texas (2000-2001). After returning to Utrecht, he followed the pediatric residency program followed by a pediatric infectious diseases and immunology fellowship. He have led the RSV Research Group since 2003 and became full professor in 2015.

The vision of his research is to combine clinical and basic research to decrease the global burden of RSV infection. The mission of his research group is to improve knowledge of RSV epidemiology, and to develop safe and effective therapeutic and preventive interventions.

In his work collaborate with patients is of highest importance. His work is supported by the RSV Patient Advisory Board (PAB) since 2012. The PAB has reviewed every grant application by the RSV Research Group. PAB members have been interviewed for newspapers and national television on RSV-related subjects.

Louis Bont actively participates as a teacher in the SUMMA program. In addition, he founded the TULIPS program in 2008 to train colleagues and young clinician-scientists.

Since April 1st 2021, Louis has been given a new position as medical scientific division manager of the Children's Division of the Wilhelmina Children's Hospital in Utrecht.