Dr. Kuijjer’s research centres on solving fundamental biological questions through the development of new methods in computational and systems biology. Her research also focuses on implementing these techniques to better understand gene regulation in healthy tissues, and also in diseases such as cancer.
Kuijjer is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the group of Professor John Quackenbush at the Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) and Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health (HSPH). Her research here has focused on developing computational methods for integrative network science, with the aim of better understanding cancer.
Kuijjer has a PhD in cancer genomics from the Department of Pathology in Leiden University Medical Centre (LUMC) in the Netherlands. Here she was based in the group of Dr. Pancras Hogendoorn, working on integrating multi-omics osteosarcoma data.
Kuijjer has also previously collaborated with the Molecular Sarcoma and Translational Genomics Unit at the Institute for Cancer Research, Oslo University Hospital.
Professor Kjetil Taskén, Director of NCMM comments:
Dr Kuijjer will bring added expertise in molecular medicine, cancer genomics, and computational biology to NCMM, and we are very pleased to welcome her. The fact that she has also previously collaborated with a group at Oslo University Hospital is a real bonus for us; we are always interested in these types of collaborations, as they really help to enhance our translational research outputs.
“We have also been working to build up our expertise in bioinformatics and systems medicine, so her background and research interests are an excellent fit for the Centre.”
Marieke Kuijjer comments:
“I am very excited to join NCMM, and am looking forward to starting my own research group in Systems Medicine in Oslo. My research programme will focus on developing computational tools to integrate 'omics data into networks of interacting molecules. I will apply these systems tools to large-scale cancer datasets to pinpoint specific mechanisms that drive the disease.
“I am particularly interested in using and adapting my methods to model how gene regulation is disrupted in individual tumours, and then to associate these alterations with phenotypic data, such as patient outcomes. This will help to give us a better understanding of the heterogeneity of cancer, and may point to new targets for personalised medicine.
I am also very enthusiastic about joining the Nordic EMBL Partnership network, as this will help me to set up collaborations with researchers across the institutes.
"Given my background in sarcomas, I am also very much looking forward to collaborating with the excellent sarcoma research groups in Norway to map the genomic and regulatory alterations in this rare cancer type."
Kuijjer is expected to join NCMM officially in October 2018.