PhD Students

Matthias Schewe
He is currently working as a post-doctoral fellow in the prestigious laboratory led by Pekka Katajisto in Helsinki, Finland.
http://www.biocenter.helsinki.fi/bi/katajisto/
matthias.schewe@helsinki.fi

Yaser Atlasi
His PhD thesis is entitled "Wnt signaling in stem cells and cancer".
Yaser is currently a postdoctoral fellow in Prof. H. Stunnenberg's laboratory , at the Department of Molecular Biology of the Radboud University, in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, where he is continuing his research on embryonic stem cells.

Yongyi Wang
In 2007 he started working as a PhD student in his lab until 2011 when he defended his thesis entitled “Signaling pathways and stem cells in uterus and fallopian tubes”.

Sabrina Roth

Claudia Gaspar
From 2009 until 2016 she was a postdoctoral fellow at the lab of Domingos Henrique, Instituto de Medicina Molecular (Lisbon, Portugal) where she worked on retinal cell fate decisions.
She is currently a Science Officer at Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (Lisbon, Portugal).

Paola Alberici
After a short postdoc in Peter ten Dijke group in Leiden, (January 2007-April 2008) she moved back to Italy where she worked in PierPaolo Di Fiore’s laboratory at the FIRC Institute of Molecular Oncology, Milan, studying in vivo the role of adaptors in the EGFR internalization. In 2013 she moved to the pharmaceutical industry and worked for 2 years as Medical Advisor for rare disease in Recordati spa.
Currently, she holds a position at Pfizer Oncology as Medical Scientific Relation.
Yvonne Hendriks
She is currently working as a clinical geneticist and counsellor at the Free University Medical Center (VUMC) in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Joana Cardoso Vaz
After returning to Portugal, she worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Molecular Medicine, Lisbon.
In 2011, she moved to the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciências, Oeiras, where she worked in the Computational Genomics Lab and participated in several cancer research projects.
She is currently the Scientific Director and a co-founder of the OPHIOMICS company.
http://www.ophiomics.com/en/about-us/

Anja Wagner
She combined her PhD research with her medical training as Clinical Geneticist. Her PhD thesis entitled “HNPCC: Molecular and Clinical Dilemmas” encompassed many key publications including the identification of a founder mutation responsible for a large proportion of the HNPCC cases in the US.
Currently, Anja is working as a clinical geneticist at the dept. of Clinical Genetics of the Erasmus MC in Rotterdam.
http://www.erasmusmc.nl/klinische_genetica/patient/staf/wagner/

Kris Siezen
She is now working as a non-clinical assessor for the Medicines Evaluation Board in Utrecht.

Ron Smits
His thesis entitled "APC and cancer: It takes two to tango" was successfully defended in 2002 (cum laude).
Beginning of 2003, he joined Genentech Inc., South San Francisco, CA, as a research scientist to establish and characterize spontaneous intestinal tumor models. Here, he also developed a novel research on the cross-talk between receptor tyrosine kinases and ß-catenin signaling in cancer, for which he was awarded a Vidi (ZonMW) grant in 2004 when he was appointed as an assistant professor in the Dept. of Pathology of the Erasmus MC in Rotterdam.
Since January 2008, he is a staff member at the Dept. of Gastroenterology and Hepatology of the Erasmus MC, where he focuses on molecular mechanisms contributing to intestinal tumor formation and metastasis.

Peter Hohenstein
After a long period as a Reader/Group Leader in The Roslin Institute (University of Edinburgh) where he studied the link between normal kidney development and kidney disease, Peter is now back to The Netherlands, at the Dept. of Human Genetics of the Leiden University Medical Center where he carries on his research on kidney development, disease, and regenerative medicine.
https://www.lumc.nl/org/humanegenetica/research/researchline4/kidneydevelopment diseaseandregenerativemedicine/
P.Hohenstein@lumc.nl

Robert Balten (Rob) Van Der Luijt
The PhD study was supervised by the late professor P. Meera Khan and co-supervised by Riccardo.
In November 1996, Rob successfully defended his PhD thesis at Leiden University. From March 1996 he has been working at the University Medical Center Utrecht (UMCU) as a clinical laboratory specialist (main focus areas: genetic diagnostics of hereditary tumour syndromes / DNA sequence variant classification).
Rob is actively and passionately involved in (bio-)medical education at UMCU, both as a teacher, coordinator and developer of several (under-)graduate courses and lectures.