Adjunct Principal Investigator Thijn Brummelkamp’s affiliation came to an end after having been associated with CeMM for ten years. We would like to sincerely thank him for a great collaboration on the scientific front and fruitful exchanges and constant engagement with the CeMM community.

Thijn Brummelkamp received his Msc in biology from the Free University in Amsterdam in 1998. He did his graduate research at The Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam in the group of René Bernards and received his PhD cum laude from Utrecht University in 2003. After his PhD he was appointed as group leader at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge (USA). In 2011 his laboratory moved to the Netherlands Cancer Institute, and he became a CeMM Adjunct Principal Investigator.

For his studies he received the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Award (2003), The Annual NVBMB Award (2004, Dutch Association for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology). Thijn Brummelkamp  was chosen as one of the world's top 35 Young Innovators by MIT's Technology Review Magazine (2005) and received the Kimmel Scholar Award (2006). He received an ERC starting grant from the European Research Council (2012), the 2012 Molecular Biosystems Early Career Award and the EMBO Gold Medal in 2013.

Thijn Brummelkamp has contributed to CeMM’s expertise in biomedical genetics. His group has been using genetic approaches to identify genes that play a role in human disease, with a focus on cancer research, infectious disease, and drug action. In this area, Thijn Brummelkamp’s group has developed technologies to accelerate the genetic analysis of cultured mammalian cells. A “stable RNA interference” process, which he and his colleagues first described, is now widely used to manipulate and study gene function in mammalian cells. He also developed an approach for haploid genetic screens in human cells applying insertional mutagenesis, which he employed to identify host factors used by a variety of pathogens. He is a co-founder of the CeMM spin-off company Haplogen, a biopharmaceutical company with the mission to improve human health by combating infectious disease.

We wish Thijn all the very best in his scientific career and continuing success for him and his group at the Netherlands Cancer Institute as well as many more publications, research projects and awards!