Michael Van Gerven Email & Phone Number

Leiden, Zuid-Holland, Nederland

Utrecht En Omgeving, Nederland

Amersfoort

Netherlands

Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

The European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) is one of the world’s leading research institutions, and Europe’s flagship laboratory for the life sciences. The research here is conducted by 1600 employees at 6 sites across Europe and divided into more then 80 independent research groups. In EMBL-Heidelberg I worked in the group of dr. Kyung-Min Noh, whose main focus is the role of chromatin in typical neurodevelopment and in developmental disorder. Here I worked on a gene that is highly associated with autism spectrum disorder and is indirectly involved in epigenetics through its histone-modifying binding partner. In this project I successfully re-introduced the complete and several patient-specific mutant forms of the gene in a homozygous and heterozygous knock-out (KO) mouse embryonic stem cell line. By qPCR I validated that introduction of the wild-type gene led to restoration of the most significant differentially expressed genes observed for the KO cell lines. Additionally, I determined the molecular aetiology of 6 patient mutations by western blot analysis and showed with immunopreciptation that there is an indication that the mutants might not be able to bind to the histone-modifying binding partner of our gene of interest. Altogether, I had a great time in the EMBL and had the pleasure to work and connect with many dedicated people.

Utrecht

The Hubrecht Institute is a research institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) - situated on the campus of the Utrecht University - and with a focus on developmental and stem cell biology. The research here is conducted by 19 independent research groups that combined consist of a total of 220 employees. Here I worked in the group of prof. dr. Wouter de Laat, whose main focus is the role of the 3D structure of the nucleus on genome function and haplotyping with their own designed technique Targeted-Locus Amplification (TLA). In this group I had two project, one involved haplotyping of patients with beta-thalassemia, while the other consisted of performing optimisations for developing a new technique. For the first project I generated targeted haplotypes for two patients of the HBB locus, which is the region containing the patient mutations. In this manner I validated that haplotypes could be generated for this repetitive DNA region and therefore that the technique non-invasive prenatal diagnostics (NIPD) – developed by Wouter’s group – could potentially also be used for patients with beta-thalassemia. The second project is confidential, however I can tell that we had some promising results and that I learned a lot about bacterial cloning with electroporation. Additionally, I decided to improve the protocol for making electro-competent cells and resulted in a significant reduction of the time needed to create and validate the cells. Furthermore, the improvement I made also led to a higher electroporation efficiency. However, the most important thing that I learned here is that I really like to work in the lab.

Hilversum, Provincie Noord-Holland, Nederland

Jack&Jones is a franchise store that is part of Bestseller company and exclusively sells men's clothes. I had several responsibilities here, namely:• Helping costumers proactively• Handling transactions• Ensuring goods are well displayed and refilled• Keeping the shop tidy and well organisedI acquired several skills during this job:• Cooperating in a small team• Talking about many different subjects• Being proactive all the time (even though this could be a bit scary sometimes)I had a great time here together with my colleagues, in which we had to closely collaborate to reach the daily sales targets. A part of our collaboration included friendly competitions, in which we all individually tried to sell the most. Very often I won these competitions to my own surprise and even defeated the shop manager several times. Therefore, I learned that competition and cooperation can go hand in hand with each other, but only when collaboration is the main focus.

Hilversum, Provincie Noord-Holland, Nederland

Hoogvliet is one of the cheapest supermarkets in the Netherlands and has a total of 67 shops distributed across 4 out of the 12 provinces. Here I had several responsibilities, namely:• Re-stocking of shelves• Keeping the shop tidy and well organised• Helping customers• CleaningI acquired several skills during this job, namely:• Working as fast and efficient as possible• Cooperating with many people of different ages• To think commercially Here I had the great pleasure to work with a lot of interesting people, all with other personalities and ambitions. The most important think that I learned here was to minimize the time needed to perform all the work, by planning the work in advance.

Master Of Science - Ms, Master Of Science (Msc), Biomedical Sciences: Cancer, Stem Cells & Developmental Biolgy

Bachelor Of Science (Bsc), Biology

Activities and Societies: UBV

Atheneum

Havo

Vmbo-Tl