ICG2013
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Wigard Kloosterman
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University Medical Center Utrecht
The Netherlands
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Biography:
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Wigard Kloosterman received his MSc in Biotechnology from the University of Groningen, The Netherlands (2003). He has been a PhD student in the lab of Prof. Ronald Plasterk at the Hubrecht Institute (Utrecht, NL), where he studied the expression and function of microRNAs in embryonic development. After completing his PhD, he worked for two years as a staff scientist at the DSM Biotechnology Centre in Delft. From 2009-2012 Wigard Kloosterman has been employed as an assistant professor at the Department of Medical Genetics from the University Medical Center Utrecht, where he currently holds a position as a principal investigator. His main research focus concerns the study of structural genomic rearrangements in the human genome. He was the first to show that complex rearrangements underlying congenital defects and mental retardation may result from massive chromosome shattering by double-strand DNA breaks, termed chromothripsis. Further studies in his lab are aimed at unraveling the mechanisms and functional consequences of chromothripsis rearrangements in development and cancer.
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