March 2025 – Present
Postdoctoral Researcher
Researching the genetic background of psychiatric disorders, focussing on Major Depressive Disorder. I research trans-ancestry datasets to increase our understanding of these disorders and ultimately improve precision in psychiatry treatment.
Nov 2020 – Dec 2024
Doctoral Researcher
Technical University of Munich (DE)
I researched epistatic effects as part of the genetic aetiology of psychiatrixc disorders and comorbidities for my thesis titled: Complex Polygenic Pathway Interactions of Psychiatric Disorders and Comorbidities.
Daily supervision by Dr. Na Cai at Helmholtz Pioneer Campus, Germany.
TUM First supervisor: Prof. Dr. Bertram Müller-Myshok
Tum Secondary supervisor: Dr. Bastian Rieck
Extracurriculars:
– Coordinator of Mental Health Awareness Month 2024; founding, design and content creation for quarterly newsletter; event organisation and Welcome Team for new doctoral researchers as part of DINI: Doctoral Initiative at Helmholtz Munich
Sep 2018 – Aug 2020
Master of Science: Molecular and Cellular Life Sciences
University of Utrecht (NL)
Main Research Project:
Analysis of Metagenomic Chromosome Conformation Capture methods and MetaTOR pipeline under supervision of Dr. Giannis Stringlis and Dr. Ronnie de Jonge at the Plant-Microbe Interactions group headed by Prof. Dr. Corné Pieterse.
Minor: ‘Applied Data Science’
Thesis (3-week literature review): ‘Omnigenic extistential crisis: looking for validation’. Supervised by Dr. Patrick Deelen and Dr. Jeroen de Ridder.
Extracurriculars
– Chair, secretary and 2nd violinist for the Kunstorchestra
– Commissary Extern for contentcreation, external communication and webdesign of KOSMU
Sep 2015 – Jul 2018
Bachelor of Science: Life Science and Technology
I completed my Bachelor Studies in Life Science and Technology (biology) at the University of Groningen, Netherlands.
I majored in Molecular Life Sciences and followed a minor in Behavioral Neuroscience. One course on compatuational genetics was an internship supervised by Dr. Harm-Jan Westra within the Franke Lab me and a peer student looked into the predictive power of methylation-Quantitative-Trait-Loci to predict gene expression applied in Python.
My thesis ‘The molecular mechanism of surfactin immunity in B. subtilis‘ was done under supervision of Prof. Dr. Dirk-Jan Scheffers
Extracurriculars:
– Secretary and Editor of the Lifeline Magazine of GLV Idun
– Website commitee member and content creator for the Surface website.
Sep 2009 – May 2015
Pre-University Education
I completed my pre-university (high school) education, (VWO in Dutch, more on that here) at the Nuborgh College Lambert Franckens in Elburg, The Netherlands.
The second half of which I followed the tracks of both Nature & Health, and Nature & Technics. For my final profile report I conducted a survey under students and interviewed staff to judge how well the school was suited to cope with a government-required change that would increase the placement of specific children with special needs into the regular classrooms. It was titled ‘is the NCLF Autism Spectrum -Proof?’