Dr (Willem) Joost Lesterhuis is an NHMRC RD Wright Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia (UWA) and a Simon Lee Honorary Research Fellow at Telethon Kids Institute. He has a background as a dual-trained medical oncologist and basic researcher in cancer immunology.
Joost obtained his MD at the Free University in Amsterdam 2001, and completed his medical oncology specialization and his PhD in immunology at the Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands in 2010. From 2011-2012 he was a visiting post-doc at UWA. Since 2013, when he and his family moved permanently to Australia, he has been a full-time research fellow at the School of Biomedical Sciences at UWA, with special focus on cancer immunology research. Since October 2018 he heads the Sarcoma Group at the Cancer Center of the Telethon Kids Institute.
His research focuses on identifying new effective treatment combinations in in cancer, in particular pediatric sarcoma and mesothelioma, in preclinical models and clinical studies. His research combines several fields of science including cancer immunology, systems biology, drug discovery and translational oncology.