My research seeks to answer a fundamental question: why do some individuals develop brain disorders while others remain resilient? To address this question, I combine genetics, neuroscience, statistics, and computational science to uncover the biological mechanisms linking genetic and environmental risk factors to disease.
I am the head of the Department Complex Trait Genetics at the VU University and VU University Medical Centre Amsterdam, currently leading a team of ~40 scientists. Aiming to gain mechanistic insight into brain-related traits and disorders, I combine knowledge and resources from different fields. I am co-chairing the Psychiatrics Genomics Consortium (PGC) Alzheimer working group as well as the PGC Data Access Committee, and I am actively involved in several of the other PGC working groups. In the last five years my lab has focused on developing and applying novel software tools that aid in interpreting large scale genetic discovery studies, including MAGMA, a tool for gene-set analyses, FUMA, a platform for biological annotation of genetic variants, LAVA for local genetic correlation analyses, and recently FLAMES, for prioritization of causal genes. These tools are widely used in the genetics community. They aid in interpreting GWAS findings and in generating testable hypotheses for functional follow-up. In addition, I have led several large scale genetic discovery studies for Alzheimer’s dementia, cognitive ability, insomnia, and neuroticism.
Overall, my work aims to translate findings from genetic discovery studies into testable hypotheses for functional follow-up. While my own expertise is in statistical and psychiatric genetics, I collaborate strongly with experimental neuroscientists to interpret genetic findings and design functional follow-up experiments. I lead the Brainscapes consortium, which received a 20M€ grant from the Dutch government (2020-2030), aiming to integrate genetics and neuroscience to gain mechanistic insight into multiple brain disorders, in 2019 I received the advanced EU-ERC grant (‘From GWAS to function’) that allows me to further develop statistical genetic methods. My lab also hosts the VU University stem cell lab, facilitating rapid connection between computational and stem cell scientists Since 2007, I am the director of the Genetic Cluster Computer, which aims to facilitate cluster computing in genetics on a global scale. It currently includes >9000 computing cores and is the central computing and data storage center for many international large scaled genetic collaborations, including the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium.
I am a strong advocate of data sharing and open science, and all our tools and results are freely available from our lab website to be used without the need for co-authorships. Research from my lab has been published in major journals, including Nature Genetics, Nature Neuroscience, Nature, Science, The Lancet, Cell, and Neuron.
