Cara De Galan was educated as a biomedical scientist (specialized in immunology) at Ghent University and started as a PhD student at the IBD research unit Ghent, headed by Prof. Dr. Debby Laukens. She performs translational and fundamental research in the field of inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), with as main focus the identification of predictive markers of response to biological treatments in IBD and the identitification/validation of novel targets to tackle intestinal inflammation and IBD development. During her PhD, she presented at several national and international conferences and obtained the 'Belgian Inflammatory Bowel Disease Research and Development (BIRD)' - research grant in 2017 and a Basic Science - travel grant from UEGW2019.