Lut Lynen graduated as a medical doctor in 1985 from the Catholic University of Leuven. Between 1986 and 1992, she worked for MSF Belgium in Chad, Sudan and Guinea. In 1997 she became a specialist in Internal Medicine at the University of Antwerp.

She worked for the Institute of Tropical Medicine (ITM) in Cambodia from 1999 to 2002, and in 2003 she joined the HIV team at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp. Her field of interest is HIV and tuberculosis, focusing on resource-limited settings. She has been a WHO guideline development group member on Opportunistic Infections and authored the MSF AIDS care guidelines.

In July 2011, she became the head of the Department of Clinical Sciences and, in November 2011, the head of the Unit HIV & TB. The Unit currently has 10 PhD students and two postdoctoral scientists.

In 2020 she became the scientific director of ITM’s DRC office in Kinshasa, combined with her position as head of the Unit in Antwerp.

In 2023 she returned to Antwerp and took the position of director of ITM.