dr. Fiona Hagenbeek

Fiona Hagenbeek (1989) recently started as a postdoctoral researcher in Group Ripatti at the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FIMM) at the University of Helsinki. Initially, her work at FIMM will focus on exploring the gene-environment interplay of socioeconomic indicators and common diseases and disorders. She is also a visiting fellow at the Department of Biological Psychology and the Netherlands Twin Register (NTR) at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam where she obtained her PhD and completed her first postdoc. As part of the EU-funded ACTION project (Aggression in Children: Unraveling gene-environment interplay to inform Treatment and InterventiON strategies), she developed protocols for the collection of urine and buccal-cell samples in children (https://dx.doi.org/10.17504/protocols.io.eq2ly7qkwlx9/v1). She applied these protocols in a large cohort of twin children of the NTR and obtained genome-wide SNP and DNA methylation data from the buccal cells and urinary metabolites from three targeted metabolomics platforms. With these datasets, she contributed to genetic, epigenetic, metabolomic, and multi-omic efforts to discover omics markers for aggression and related problem behaviors. Moreover, she investigated the link between genetics and metabolomics by studying the contribution of genes and environment to blood and urinary metabolite levels in adult and child populations, respectively. Besides her research, she represented the NTR in the “Connecting Data in Child Development” (CD²) project. CD² developed a FAIR digital infrastructure that encompasses harmonized metadata of six youth cohorts in the Netherlands (https://beta.data.individualdevelopment.nl/).