Eric Spierings, PhD, is Associate Professor of Transplantation Immunology and Medical Immunologist at UMC Utrecht, the Netherlands. He is Director of Transplantation Diagnostics and head of the EFI-accredited HLA and Tissue Typing laboratory. His work focuses on immunogenetics, HLA matching, T-cell epitopes, HLA antibody interpretation, and data standards for transplant diagnostics. A recurring theme in his work is the translation of complex HLA, antibody and immunological data into clinically usable algorithms, reporting formats and decision-support tools for transplantation.
Within EFI, he is Chair of the Bioinformatics and Information Technology Committee, where he contributes to the development and implementation of bioinformatics approaches for histocompatibility and immunogenetics laboratories. He has contributed to international HLA data-standardisation initiatives, including structured formats for genotype and antibody data exchange, and is active in the DaSH initiative on HLA-specific antibody reporting standardisation and harmonisation. He co-chaired the 18th International HLA & Immunogenetics Workshop and continues to contribute to international education and collaboration in H&I.
At the EFI Summer School 2026, he will lecture on machine learning as a tool for predicting de novo donor-specific HLA antibodies and will lead the two-part hands-on workshop on HLA sequence bioinformatics. The hands-on session will guide participants from genomic HLA sequence data to coding sequence, protein sequence, closest-allele identification, ARD and G/P-group interpretation, surface-accessibility assessment and structural mapping of amino-acid changes. His contribution connects practical laboratory diagnostics with sequence interpretation, computational tools and clinically relevant immunogenetic reasoning.
