Born in Aruba, Dr. Ralph Pantophlet completed his early schooling on the island before moving to the Netherlands, where he obtained his B.Sc. in medical microbiology from the Hogeschool Rotterdam & Omstreken in 1995. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Leiden in 1999 for research on the immunochemical properties of Acinetobacter lipopolysaccharides. He subsequently conducted postdoctoral research on anti-HIV antibodies and vaccine design at The Scripps Research Institute under the mentorship of Dr. Dennis Burton. After a brief research appointment at the Research Center Borstel, he returned to the Burton laboratory in 2003 as a senior postdoctoral fellow to continue work on HIV-1 vaccine design.

Dr. Pantophlet joined Simon Fraser University’s Faculty of Health Sciences in 2008, where he is now a tenured Professor and an Associate Faculty member in the Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry. He leads the Laboratory of Infectious Diseases Immunology, as well as the Flow Cytometry Laboratory and the Biocontainment for Infectious Organisms level 3 (BIO3) facility.