Tom Meuleman is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Eindhoven University of Technology. After graduating with a Bachelor degree in Chemistry and Master degree in Molecular Cellular Life Sciences from the University of Utrecht, he obtained PhD degree from the University of Glasgow. His research interests are a union of virology, medicinal chemistry, and chemical biology. The research during his PhD was focused on the design of synthetic vaccines, using tools from the three different fields that included epitope mapping, peptide- and conjugation- chemistry, and biological evaluation. He has always been interested in combining different scientific fields and establishing fruitful collaborations. He considers that the Centre of Living Technologies provides him with an excellent platform to do just that and presents him with opportunities to gain more experience in new disciplines. His present research is focused on mammalian synthetic biology to implement optogenetic transcription strategies to facilitate a light-sensitive synthetic cell-to-cell communication pathway resulting in a fluorescent readout.