Staff
Dr. Peter Lansdorp
Scientific Director
Team Leader: Laboratory of Genetic Instability, Ageing and Cancer
Peter Lansdorp was trained as a MD at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam before he obtained a PhD in Immunology and Experimental hematology from the University of Amsterdam in 1985. During his graduate studies he started making monoclonal antibodies and he became increasingly interested in growth factors such as IL-6 and the role of stem cells in blood cell formation. In 1985 he moved to the Terry Fox Laboratory at the BC Cancer Agency in Vancouver, where his work on the purification and culture of human and murine hematopoietic stem cells led him to studies of telomere biology. Other current interests are related to the possibility that gene expression and cell fate is regulated in part by chromatin differences between sister chromatids as predicted by the “silent sister” hypothesis. The Lansdorp lab has developed novel methods to detect and study sister chromatids for such studies. Peter Lansdorp currently is a distinguished scientist at the Terry Fox Laboratory and a Professor in the Division of Hematology at the Department of Medicine of the University of British Columbia. He was recently appointed as the first Scientific Director of the European Research Institute on the Biology of Ageing (ERIBA)..
Peter Lansdorp was recently awarded with an €2.5 million Advanced Grant by the European Research Council for his research project on the role of telomeres and stem cells in ageing.
Click on the link at the bottom of the page to read more about Peter Lansdorp.
Dr. Gerald de Haan
Scientific Co-Director
Team Leader: Laboratory of Ageing Biology and Stem Cells
Gerald de Haan received his MSc (1990) and PhD (1995) from the University of Groningen. As a graduate student he was employed by the University of Cologne, working on the regulation of blood cell production by growth factors. He became a postdoc at the University of Kentucky with Gary Van Zant where he worked on stem cell aging, and returned to the Netherlands as a fellow of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences. He established his own lab at the Department of Cell Biology, where he was appointed full professor in 2005. He was awarded a VICI grant by the Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research in 2007.
The general scope of studies in the Department of Stem Cell Biology is to further improve the understanding of mechanisms that specify normal stem cell functioning. Studies focus on hematopoietic stem cells, largely because superior technical tools and invaluable functional assays exist to study stem cells in this particular tissue. Gerald’s group is interested in the unique genetic and epigenetic program that distinguishes stem cells from non-stem cells.
Click on the link at the bottom of the page to read more about Gerald de Haan.
Dr. Michael Chang
Team Leader: Laboratory of Telomeres and Genome Integrity
Michael Chang received his PhD degree at the University of Toronto in 2005 under the supervision of Dr. Grant W. Brown, studying DNA damage response pathways using high-throughput functional genomics. After his PhD, he took a position at the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research (ISREC) in Lausanne as a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Dr. Joachim Lingner, whose research is focused on telomerase and chromosome end replication. During this time, he determined that the processivity of yeast telomerase is significantly enhanced at critically short telomeres in a manner dependent upon the ATM-ortholog Tel1. In 2008, Michael moved to the lab of Dr. Rodney Rothstein at the Columbia University Medical Center in New York. He has continued to study factors that regulate telomerase, including the effect of changes in dNTP pools on telomerase-mediated telomere length homeostasis. More recently, he has become interested in telomerase-independent modes of telomere maintenance, termed ALT (for Alternative Lengthening of Telomeres). In yeast, ALT cells are called ‘survivors’ and maintain their telomeric DNA via recombination-based processes. Michael has discovered that long telomeres are preferentially extended in survivors.
He will join ERIBA as an Assistant Professor in 2012 where he will continue studying both telomerase-dependent and telomerase-independent telomere maintenance mechanisms.
E-mail: e-mailadres
Dr. Eugene Berezikov
Team Leader: Laboratory of Stem Cell Regulation and Mechanisms of Regeneration
Eugene Berezikov studied natural sciences at the Novosibirsk State University (Russia), specializing in molecular biology, and graduated with honors in 1997. He received PhD degree in cell biology from the Institute of Cytology and Genetics (Novosibirsk, Russia) in 2000. For his postdoctoral studies he joined the laboratory of Prof. Ronald Plasterk at Hubrecht Institute, where he developed a method for homologous gene targeting in C. elegans and performed series of works on discovery and characterization of small RNAs and microRNAs in particular. In 2007 he was appointed as a group leader at Hubrecht Institute and started to work with the flatworm Macrostomum lignano. This animal is emerging as a powerful model organism for research on regeneration, stem cell biology and ageing due to its high regeneration capacity, experimental accessibility and amenability to genetic manipulation. In order to investigate regulation of neoblasts - the stem cells of the animal - by small RNAs and other molecular pathways, Berezikov group is developing genomic tools and resources for M. lignano, including de novo genome sequencing and annotation, identification of neoblast markers, transgenics, and forward and reverse genetics methods. E. Berezikov is EMBO Young Investigator from 2010. In 2012 his group will relocate to ERIBA to study relations between stem cells and ageing using M. lignano as a model.
Click on the link at the bottom of the page to read more about Eugene Berezikov.
E-mail: e-mailadres
Dr. Floris Foijer
Team Leader: Laboratory of Genomic Instability in Development and Disease
Floris Foijer obtained his PhD degree at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam in 2006. His PhD research in the lab of Prof. Hein te Riele, focused on alternative mechanisms of cell cycle arrest in cells that are predisposed to cancer. He uncovered a checkpoint in the G2 phase of the cell cycle that allows these cells to arrest, but also showed that when this arrest is alleviated such cells become chromosomal unstable, thus predisposing them further to unconstrained proliferation. For his postdoc, funded by the Dutch Cancer Society (KWF fellow), Foijer went to the lab of Prof. Peter Sorger at Harvard Medical School in Boston, USA, where he pursued the link between cancer and chromosome instability further. In Prof. Sorger’s lab, he developed murine models for chromosomal instability in the skin and the mammary gland and developed an interest in high resolution intravital imaging. In 2008, the need for more sophisticated murine models for high resolution imaging led him to the lab of Prof. Allan Bradley, at the Wellcome Trust Sanger institute, in Cambridge, UK, where he is developing a murine model to track chromosomal instability in living animals over time.
Floris Foijer is currently funded by an EMBO long-term fellowship and will start his own group at the ERIBA in the end of 2011.
E-mail: e-mailadres
Dr. Victor Guryev
Team Leader: Laboratory of Genome Structure and Ageing
Victor Guryev was trained as molecular biologist at Novosibirsk State University and received his PhD from Institute of Cytology and Genetics (Novosibirsk, Russia) in 2002. As a postdoc he joined groups of Prof. Ronald Plasterk and Dr. Edwin Cuppen at Hubrecht Institute to work on discovery and characterization of natural and induced genetic differences in model organism (rat, zebrafish, C. elegans) and characterization of their haplotype structure. Since 2006 his primary interest has been in functional consequences of structural changes in genomes. He constructed the first map of copy-number variants in rat and showed their effect on gene expression. Fascinated by structural plasticity of mammalian genomes, he combines his bioinformatics expertise and recent technological advances, such as high-throughput sequencing, to investigate dynamics of genome changes in populations and individual organisms. He is involved in several projects studying small- and large-scale genome structure variations in human and laboratory rat populations. Victor is currently a faculty member of Netherlands Bioinformatics Centre (NBIC) and the head of bioinformatics at Hubrecht Institute. In summer of 2012 he will join ERIBA to focus on studying changes of structural genome variations and their role in ageing.
E-mail: e-mailadres
Dr. Ellen Nollen
Team Leader: Laboratory of Molecular Neurobiology of Ageing
Ellen Nollen currently holds a Rosalind Franklin Fellowship at the Department of Genetics, University Medical Centre Groningen, in the Netherlands, where she is studying the molecular basis of Parkinson’s disease and other aging-associated neurodegenerative diseases. In July 2011 she was awarded an ERC Starting Independent Researcher Grant (€1.5 million) to work on ‘Protein damage control: regulation of toxic protein aggregation in aging-associated neurodegenerative diseases’, In November 2011 she was named as an EMBO Young Investigator. In 2007 she received an Alfred Tissières Young Investigator Award.
Ellen Nollen previously worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the Dept. of Functional Genomics, Hubrecht Laboratory, Utrecht, under Prof. Ronald Plasterk, for which she had an NWO-VENI grant, and in the Dept. of Biochemistry, Northwestern University, Evanston, USA, under Prof. Rick Morimoto, during which she was supported by NWO-Talent and EMBO long-term fellowships. She completed her PhD thesis on “Hsp70 chaperone functions in stressed cells” in 2000 under Prof. Harm Kampinga at the University of Groningen.
Click on the link at the bottom of the page to read more about Ellen Nollen.
E-mail: e-mailadres
Dr. Christian Riedel
Team Leader: "Laboratory of Molecular Mechanisms in Lifespan Regulation.
Christian Riedel’s lab studies molecular mechanisms of lifespan regulation using the model system C. elegans. Particular focus of his work is the regulation and function of the transcription factor DAF-16/FOXO – a central driver of longevity in all metazoans. In a second line of research, his lab explores aging-relevant roles of the epigenome.
Christian studied Biochemistry at the Universities of Bochum (GER) and Tuebingen (GER) and conducted his Diploma thesis in the lab of Dr. Michael Knop at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried (GER), investigating gametogenesis in S. cerevisiae. In 2006 he received his PhD from the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology, I.M.P., and University of Vienna (AUT). During his thesis work in the lab of Prof. Kim Nasmyth he unveiled the mechanism protecting centromeric sister chromatid cohesion during the first meiotic cell division and identified a protein complex preventing aberrant kinetochore attachments to the mitotic spindle.
Since 2007, Christian Riedel has been a Postdoctoral Fellow in the lab of Prof. Gary Ruvkun at Mass. General Hospital/Harvard Medical School in Boston (USA), where he initiated his studies on aging and lifespan regulation. Christian Riedel has been supported by fellowships from the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) and the Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP).
Click on the link at the bottom of the page to read more about Christian Riedel.
E-mail: e-mailadres
Dr. Liesbeth Veenhoff
Team Leader: Laboratory of Laboratory of Cellular Biochemistry
Liesbeth Veenhoff received her PhD in 2001 from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Her PhD, with Bert Poolman, is on the mechanism of transport of sugars by a bacterial transport protein, and has provided her with a solid background in biochemistry and membrane biology. As a HFSP- fellow she moved to the laboratory of cellular biology of Michael Rout at the Rockefeller University in New York. Here, she worked in a collaborative effort to determine the architecture of the Nuclear Pore Complex of baker’s yeast. The intricate structure of this molecular machine fascinated, and the richness of the biology of nuclear transport impressed. So, when moving back to the laboratory of Bert Poolman in 2003, she continued to work on the nuclear pore complex and nuclear envelope of yeast, first as a Veni and later as a Vidi fellow.
Liesbeth Veenhoff is currently an assistant professor at the UMCG. The role of nuclear transport in cellular aging, and in particular its function in regulating access to the inner membrane of the nuclear envelope, will be the central interest of her lab at ERIBA.
E-mail: e-mailadres
Scientific Advisory Board
The external SAB consists of Piet Borst (former Director Netherlands Cancer Institute Amsterdam), Jan Hoeijmakers (Chair Department of Cell Biology and Genetics, Erasmus Medical Center Rotterdam), James L. Kirkland (Director Kogod Center of Aging, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN), and Keith R. Humphries (Director Terry Fox Laboratory, BC Cancer Agency, Vancouver, BC).
Facilities
Staf and technicians of the ERIBA department can use top facilities in the University and the University Hospital. Check the links below to gather more information about the subjects.