Tamar Tak

Utrecht University

Tamar Tak trained as an immunologist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He started his career at the Laboratory for Translational Immunology and the Department of Respiratory Medicine at the University Medical Center Utrecht. There, he studied the lifespan and kinetics of neutrophils, monocytes, and their subsets in health and disease using flow cytometry, in vivo deuterium labeling, and computational modeling.

After obtaining his PhD (cum laude), he moved to Paris to investigate the ontogeny of myeloid cells and the kinetics of stem cells in the Quantitative Immuno-Hematology team at Institut Curie, using cellular barcoding techniques and flow cytometric evaluation of single-cell cultures to study immune cell progenitor proliferation and differentiation. Subsequently, Tamar moved back to the Netherlands and returned to the fields of immunology and respiratory medicine at the Department of Parasitology at Leiden University Medical Center. There, he used high-dimensional single-cell techniques such as single-cell RNA sequencing, mass cytometry, and spectral cytometry, together with advanced data analysis, to investigate the biology of acute and allergic immune responses.

As flow cytometry has been a common thread throughout Tamar's career, and he was often the first person to test new instruments, it was a logical step for him to move to the Flow Cytometry Core Facility at Leiden University Medical Center, which is recognized as a Shared Resource Laboratory by the International Society for Advancement of Cytometry. Since 2022, Tamar has been Head of the Facility, where he continues to support advances in immunology while also working to improve the field of flow cytometry itself. So far, this work has resulted in an Optimized Multicolor Immunophenotyping Panel (OMIP-104) and the development of FlowCytoMonitoR, an app for advanced monitoring of flow cytometer performance.