F.M.S. de Vrij, PhD

I am a neurobiologist with a main focus on cellular disease models to study the molecular and cellular mechanisms that underly psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders.

I obtained my PhD at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience in Amsterdam studying the molecular mechanisms of Alzheimer's disease, continued by postdoctoral work at EMC on Fragile X Syndrome.

I have been working with Steven Kushner (Kushner lab De Vrij group) in the department of Psychiatry since 2010, where I am now leading a research group applying induced pluripotent stem cell modeling of brain diseases.

Neuroscience Cell biology Induced pluripotent stem cell technology My main research is focused on the characterisation of neural cells from psychiatric patients, including schizophrenia and depression.

Skin fibroblasts or blood cells from patients and control siblings within affected families are reprogrammed to form inducible pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) which can then be differentiated into brain cells in culture. These neural cultures are used to identify disease-related changes in neural characteristics such as differentiation, morphology, outgrowth, connectivity and cell signalling.