Dr. van der Goot received her Ph.D. in 1990 from the University of Paris for her study of water channels. She went did postdoctoral work at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg. In 1993, she joined the University of Geneva, where, in 2001, she was named associate professor; the same year, she received an EMBO Young Investigator Award. In 2006, she accepted her current position as professor at the Global Health Institute of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

Gisou van der Goot wants to understand the mechanisms by which anthrax toxin manages to delay the onset of normal immune responses. She uses a variety of cell biological, morphological and biochemical techniques, including an RNAi screen, to analyze the molecular mechanisms that govern the delivery and presentation of the toxin and its enzymes in the cell.