The third online seminar of 2023 will take place on September 14th from 16:00-17:00. The keynote speaker will be Dr. Rachel Lippert of the German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke. She will be joined by Imke Schuurman from Radboud UMC.
“Metabolic neurocircuits: Early exposures, environmental influences and what we can learn from mouse models”
Dr. Rachel Lippert received her PhD from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN in 2014 in Molecular Physiology and Biophysics with her thesis work:
Studies on the physiological function of the melanocortin 3 receptor (MC3R). She completed her postdoctoral training under the direction of Prof Jens
Brüning at the Max Planck Institute for Metabolic Research in Köln where she advanced projects focusing on maternal overnutrition and the dopaminergic
system. In 2020 she was selected as a Junior Research Group Leader within the NeuroCure Cluster of Excellence at the Charité – Universitätsmedizin
Berlin and opened her lab at the German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbrücke. There she leads the Neurocircuit Development and Function
department and her team uses animal models to study the complex interaction of the early nutritional and metabolic environment and the development of
neural circuits in the brain and overall general effects of energy state on brain function. In 2021 she was named as one of the Leibniz Assocaitions
‘Best Minds’ as well as being actively supported through the German Center for Diabetes Research.
“Generating human models to study and treat lysine metabolism disorders”
Imke Schuurman obtained her bachelor’s degree in biology and Medical Laboratory research at the HAN in Nijmegen, which included a research internship at the Department of Pathology at Radboudumc. Afterwards she obtained her pre-master and accordingly her master’s degree in biomedical sciences at the Radboud University in Nijmegen. For her first master internship she worked on a project at the Department of Biomedicine in Aarhus, Denmark, focusing on the role of complement activation in renal disorders. However, during some master courses she became fascinated by neural stem cell research, so in her second year she joined the lab of Dr. Nael Nadif Kasri (Human Genetics Department, Radboudumc). Here, she developed and characterized cerebral organoids to model neurodevelopmental disorders. During this internship, her interest for neural stem cell research increased even more and she decided to continue her scientific career within this research field. Therefore, she is very excited to work as a combined PhD in the groups of Dr. Alex Garanto, Prof. Nael Nadif Kasri and Prof. Clara van Karnebeek, who offered her the opportunity to combine the two amazing research areas of genetic therapy development and neural stem cell modelling. Her PhD project focusses on the generation and characterization of cellular models for two rare neurometabolic disorders (PDE and GA1) and the development of AON-based therapies to treat both diseases.