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I was born on September the 7th 1966 in a small town
in the north-east of Holland, called
Appingedam.
Shortly before my 18th birthday I left my birthplace to start my study in
Wageningen. There I studied and worked for the next 13 years, before moving
to Birmingham UK.
After I had finished my first study as botanical research assistant in Wageningen I continued to study Plantbreeding at the Wageningen Agricultural University. For two years I combined my study with a job as research assistant at an institute in Wageningen where I did research to improve the uptake of herbicides via the leaves of plants using 14C labelled 2,4D derivates. This job also gave me the financial possibility to make a trip to Africa after I finished University and before I started to work for my PhD. I spent 10 weeks in Africa visiting Rwanda, Zaire, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia in the autumn of 1992. In March 1993 I started to work for my PhD;at the department of Plant Cytology and Morphology at the Wageningen Agricultural University in a project to analyse the nuclear morphology during pollen development and androgenesis of Brassica napus, and to relate structural changes in the cell nucleus with cellular functioning. During this work I focussed on transcriptional activity and nuclear structure. 23rd of March 1999 I defended my thesis with success. From June 1998 until October 2000 I worked as a postdoc at the University of Birmingham (UK) in a project to find the internal calcium stores involved in the release of calcium during the self-incompatibility reaction in Papaver rhoae. Since Ocotber 2001 I work at the department of Genetics at the Unuversity of Leicester in the group of professor Ed Louis. The general interest of the group are telomeres and genome stability, and meiosis and DNA repair. My reseach involves the first topic My interests are: computers/internet, animals especially apes, traveling, reading and a good film. |