Responsible for setting up and running a SERI-financed, certified, open biobank/technology platform infrastructure at the Balgrist Campus. Helping to establish a network between research groups, physicians and industrial partners in the field of (pre-) clinical musculoskeletal research, to find answers for unsolved clinical musculo-skeletal research questions.

Senior Research Scientist, Balgrist University Hospital, Zürich, Switzerland: Department of Orthopedics, Orthopaedic Biomechanics (research group of Prof. Dr. J. Snedeker)

The chances for survival in patients suffering from osteosarcoma, the most common primary bone cancer, significantly drops in case metastases are found. It is therefore of great interest to visualize and quantify metastatic growth, to know if pharmacological intervention is beneficial. As Senior Researcher, I focussed on visualizing and quantifying pulmonary metastasis formation in osteosarcoma mouse models using multimodal imaging (micro-CT, IVIS) techniques. In addition, I supervised two PhD students in parallel who were working on several aspects of osteosarcoma metastasis, and successfully defended their theses in 2016.

In collaboration with the life science company DNage B.V., we studied the bone phenotype of premature aging mice as a possible new preclinical model for osteoporosis. The main techniques that I used were in vivo micro-CT imaging and micro array expression analysis. Our findings were published in Nature (Vermeij et al., Nature 2016).

In my PhD Project, I studied subchondral bone plate changes in several preclinical osteoarthritis mouse models. This resulted in my PhD thesis "Dynamic subchondral bone changes in murine models of osteoarthritis", http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/21910/