Profile

I was born, grew up and had my education in the Netherlands. I live now on my own in Oxford, and I am often in the laboratory. At university, I studied ‘molecular sciences’, learning a lot about cell biology and DNA. I did my PhD in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, where my interest in research of blood cells started. Since then, I kept on studying blood. Outside work, I enjoy meeting colleagues and friends in the pub, play a little bit of self-taught guitar, love listening to music. And being Dutch, any time off is like having a holiday in England.

Blood consists of different types of cells that all have different jobs. For instance red blood cells, these are cells that bring oxygen from the lungs to all the parts of your body that need oxygen. There are platelets that help with blood clotting when you hurt yourself. And there are a lot of white blood cells, that all play a role in protecting you from things that could make you sick such as bacteria and viruses. Blood cells are constantly being refreshed. For that, we have blood stem cells. Blood stem cells constantly make all the different types of cells to keep our blood fresh and healthy. While doing so, they have to constantly decide if they are going to make a red cell, or a platelet, or one of the white blood cells. We still don’t really understand exactly how the blood stem cells make these decisions. Unfortunately, sometimes blood stem cells make mistakes that can lead to a blood cancer. If we understand how healthy blood cells are being made, we will understand better what has gone wrong in the blood cancers. And I hope that that will lead to a better treatment of patients.

On some days, I will be mainly in the laboratory doing experiments. Since cells are extremely small (10 million cells fit into a small drop of blood), we have all kinds of sophisticated machines and techniques to study cells. For example, we can determine which genes are active in a cell, or we can culture blood stem cells under different conditions and see what type of blood cell they make. These experiments often give a lot of results, that take a lot of time to analyse. Therefore, on some days I sit mostly behind my computer. Other work that I do on my desk is reading work from other scientists (so I don’t have to repeat that work, or sometimes I am being asked to critically read their work and see if they did not make any mistakes). And lastly I regularly have to present or teach my own or other scientist’s work.