Sjoerd H. van der Burg, PhD is a professor in experimental cancer immunology and therapy at the department of medical oncology of the Leiden University Medical Center since 2010 and a Senior Investigator of the Oncode Institute since 2019. He leads the experimental cancer immunology and therapy group which performs fundamental, translational and clinical studies focusing on those factors of host-tumor interactions that determine the success and failure in immune control of cancer. His group has published several seminal studies on immunotherapy of cancer, in particular in the context of therapeutic vaccines and a new strategy to adoptively transfer tumor-specific T cells as cancer therapy. Over the years he has (co-)initiated a large series of investigator-initiated clinical trials. Currently, he leads a large (inter)national consortium on therapeutic vaccines under the umbrella of the National Growth Fund financed Oncode Accelerator program, providing a one-stop pipeline to discover new antigens, develop new vaccine formulations, immune profile patients, produce clinical grade vaccines and perform first-in-human clinical trials. Furthermore, he leads a large national consortium strongly financed by the Dutch Cancer Society, the Dutch Research Council and the Oncode Institute which focuses on the mobilization of myeloid effector cells during immunotherapy in order to complete the recently adapted cancer immunity cycle, showing the requirement of both tumor-specific T cells and myeloid effector cells for effective tumor immunity. Sjoerd started to work for JITC in 2012 as an Associate Editor for Basic Tumor Immunology. In 2019, he became the Deputy Section Editor, and was promoted to full Section Editor in 2020. Three years later he was asked to step in as Interim Deputy Editor-in-Chief, and was promoted to Deputy Editor-in-Chief in 2024.