Menno de Winther studied biology at Utrecht University and obtained his PhD in Leiden. After his PhD he was a postdoc in Oxford and Maastricht and became a principal investigator studying the role of macrophages in cardiovascular disease. In 2011 he was appointed as a professor of Vascular Immune Cell Biology at the Academic Medical Center of the University of Amsterdam. Using cellular and animal models for disease his group studies the molecular regulation of macrophages in inflammatory disease. A particular focus is on the epigenetic regulation of macrophage phenotypes and approaches to skew macrophages to a beneficial phenotype to influence disease development.