I obtained my Bachelor degree in Applied Sciences from HAN University in the Netherlands in September 2012. During the final year of my undergraduate programme, I did a thesis project in the lab of Philip Cohen. In a project supervised by Kristopher Clark, I used phosphoproteomcis to discover novel substrates of non-canonical IKKs. This research project sparked my interest in protein signalling and so I joined the 4-year PhD program at the MRC PPU in January 2013. I did my first rotation in the lab of John Rouse and then in the lab of Yogesh Kulathu. The broad aim of my PhD project in the Kulathu lab is to understand cellular roles of K29- and K33-linked polyubiquitin.