Vanessa LaPointe is currently an Associate Professor at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. She is based in the Department of Cell Biology–Inspired Tissue Engineering in the MERLN Institute for Technology-Inspired Regenerative Medicine. Her research interests are centred on understanding how to influence cell fate in regenerative medicine. 

Previously, Vanessa was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Twente. Her PhD was supervised by Professor Molly Stevens at Imperial College London (UK) on cell-substrate interactions in stem cell self-renewal and differentiation. Her Bachelors was in Biomedical Engineering from The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD (USA).