Cisca Wijmenga appointed to new Lodewijk Sandkuijl chair
1st Nov 2017 – Cisca Wijmenga has been appointed to hold a new chair installed by the University of Groningen in memory of Lodewijk Sandkuijl (1953-2002), who helped lay the foundations of statistical genetics. He conceived and developed methods to unravel the hereditary factors involved in complex diseases. See an obituary published in AJHG in 2003. Prof. Wijmenga says 'Statistics plays a large part in genetic research. It is needed to work out which part of the DNA is linked to a particular disease when studying family trees. 'Lodewijk Sandkuijl, a doctor who had retrained as a statistician, was there
Spinoza award for Cisca Wijmenga
At NWO's Bessensap event on 12th June, it was announced that Cisca Wijmenga is one of four NWO Spinoza prize winners for 2015. The NWO Spinoza prize in brief The NWO Spinoza prize is the highest award in the Netherlands science arena and can be seen as the 'Dutch Nobel Prize'. Each year, NWO awards Spinoza prizes to three or four researchers working in the Netherlands who, according to international standards, belong at the very top of their scientific field. NWO Spinoza laureates perform ground-breaking research that has a major impact and they are a source of inspiration to younger researchers. The prize winners
Lude Franke appointed associate professor
The Department of Genetics is pleased to announce that as of 1st July 2014, Lude Franke has been appointed as an associate professor. We congratulate him on his new position. On behalf of the Management Team, Cisca Wijmenga, Head of department (N.B. This level is equivalent to UHD/adjunct hoogleraar in the Dutch university system or senior lecturer in the British system.)
GUT paper on coeliac disease in F1000Prime
A recent paper by the Wijmenga group has been selected for F1000Prime. It was recommended as being of special significance in its field by Faculty Member Piero Portincasa. "Improving coeliac disease risk prediction by testing non-HLA variants additional to HLA variants" by Jihane Romanos, …Vinod Kumar, Gosia Trynka, Lude Franke, Agata Szperl, Javier Gutierrez-Achury, Cleo C van Diemen, Roan Kanninga, Soesma A Jankipersadsing, … Cisca Wijmenga, and the PreventCD Group. Published in Gut, 2014 Mar;63(3):415-22. Open access full text. Epub 2013 May 23. "In this paper, the authors highlight the importance of a more comprehensive genetic test for the diagnosis of
VENI grant for Yang Li
Dr. Yang Li, a postdoc working in the Wijmenga group, has been awarded an NWO VENI grant (€250,000) to perform systems genetics analyses on metabolic fluxes using yeast as a model system. Genetic analyses on multiple molecular levels can provide insight into how a genotype relates to a phenotype. She will use this approach to look for heritable causes of metabolite flow rate (flux) through metabolic pathways. See her homepage