October 2025: Melissa Rieder started an internship in our lab for her master Biomedical Sciences at the University of Amsterdam. Welcome Melissa!

September 2025: Together with the iPS Core Facility at Erasmus MC, Femke was involved in organising an iPS Symposium, connecting researchers at Erasmus MC. Special thanks to Keynote Speaker Nael Nadif Kasri.

September 2025: Our lab is involved in a ZonMw funded project to work on Pluripotent Stem cells for Inherited Diseases and Embryonic Research (PSIDER). Our project called TAILORED is aimed towards a human iPSC neuronal platform for neurodevelopmental disorder therapeutic discovery, headed by Ype Elgersma and is a collaboration between Erasmus MC, LUMC, UMC Utrecht and Radboud UMC Nijmegen. On September 19th we had a PSIDER network meeting combining the TAILORED and BRAINmodel consortia, with inspiring talks from consortium members, patient organisations and career perspectives. Including a fantastic keynote lecture by Sergiu Pasca.

September 2025: Femke was at the Polish Neuroscience Society meeting for a final meeting of the SAME NeuroID consortium. This consortium was a joint initiative of Łukasiewicz – PORT (Poland), Paris Brain Institute (France), Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry in Munich (Germany) and our lab to accelerate the consortium’s positioning at the forefront of neuropsychiatric research. It was a pleasure to collaborate and share our differentiation protocols to create different brain cell types and organoids from stem cells.

September 2025: Patrīcija Ozoliņa started an internship in our lab for her master Biomedical Engineering in Delft. Based on an interesting collaboration with dr. Achilleas Savva at the TU Delft. Welcome Patrīcija!

August 2025: María Madejon Sanchez and Deniz Gülyurt received their diploma as Masters of Neuroscience, congratulations and good luck with future adventures! This month also Pablo finished his work in our lab, we are glad that you stayed with us longer than your internship and hope to see you around during your new Master Molecular Medicine trajectory!

August 2025: Daan van der Vliet started as a postdoc in the lab, within the iCNS project. Congratulations on your PhD, Daan, and welcome to the team!

August 2025: Grant success for Juliette Kamp who receives an Off Road grant to study DNA repair in neurons and for Bas Lendemeijer who will study schizophrenia-linked SETD1A mutations. Read all about it here, and here.

Congratulations!

July 2025: Sakshi went to Marseille to present her beautiful work on integration of microglia in brain organoids at the European Meeting on Glial Cells in Health and Disease.

June 2025: Our lab was well represented at the Dutch Neuroscience Meeting in Tiel, Juliette co-organised a session on DNA repair and many posters were presented (Maurits, Sakshi, Mirle, Pablo, Deniz, María)!

June 2025: Labday was a lot of fun on the Rotte, nice teaming-game thanks to Pablo and a pot-luck dinner in the sun! It also marked the day that quite some people are leaving the lab, congratulations to Madelief, Tineke and Ana for finishing their internships with good grades, best of luck on new adventures!

June 2025: The annual meeting of the 3D-BrAIn consortium was in Munich this year. Great to meet everyone in person, thanks for organizing Silvia Cappello and Rebecca Bonrath! Lorenzo and Bharath from UNIGE also joined and will visit our lab for a few months, welcome!

April 2025: Bas and Femke published a book chapter on in vitro models for human neuroglia in the Handbook of Clinical Neurology on invitation by Elly Hol.

March 2025: Femke presented a lecture at The Merode club on Brain-on-Chip work in Brussels, a nice evening with interesting questions and discussions!

March 2025: Our lab participated in Brain Awareness week last week. We had a lof of fun hosting a kid’s workshop, performing at the Beer, Brain and Arts evening, public lectures and showing people around in our lab. Thanks Sakshi, Maurits, Maria, Madelief, Mirle, Deniz for helping out!

February 2025: Juliette presented her excellent work on how neurons repair DNA damage with a poster and a talk at the Keystone conference Somatic Mosaicism in Human Development, Aging, and Diseases.

February 2025: Our amazing collaborators in Munich published their work in Nature Communications. Congrats to Silvia Cappello and team! Our lab co-authored this work as we contributed the differentiation method for creating neural networks from hiPSC to study neural activity changes related to gray matter heterotopia. We are happy to continue working with these cell lines together with Silvia in our EU-fundend 3D-BrAIn project.

January 2025: Femke presented at the CONNECT symposium in Utrecht. A very interesting day with talks organized by the CONNECT consortium aimed at connecting brain organoids to the blood-brain barrier.

January 2025: A lot of fun at the New Years Party of our Department of Psychiatry! 🙂

December 2024: Great kick-off meeting of the iCNS project coordinated by Inge Huitinga at the Rode Hoed in Amsterdam. Excited to start working together in this interesting consortium! Read all about it in the link. The homepage features our favourite image by Mark! https://i-cns.nl/

November 2024: Maurits went to Wroclaw, Poland to participate in a NeuroHack event in light of the SAMENeuroID project and Maurits led the winning team with his idea! Congratulations!

November 2024: Elevator fun and a nice evening organised by Mirle and Pablo!

October 2024: Femke and Hilde are co-authors on a publication from the groups of Angelo Accardo and Daan Brinks. Our lab implemented NPC differentiation that was used in Delft to study neuronal network directionality on nanopillar arrays.

September 2024: More good news: Bas’ outstanding work on human iPSC-derived astrocytes is now published in eNeuro. Congratulations!

September 2024: A nice annual meeting at The Machinist for our Create2Solve program, with this wonderful team we are getting closer to automated high-content imaging analysis of adherent cortical organoids containing microglia and oligodendrocytes.

September 2024: Madelief Verhoeven and Tineke Grinwis started their internship in our lab from the BML program at Hogeschool Rotterdam.

Good luck Madelief and Tineke!

August 2024: Mark opened some champagne for a toast to the recent publication successes. Cheers!

August 2024: The NOCI consortium that we are part of published a Perspective in Nature Biomedical Engineering! A massive effort of all the NOCI PhD students and scientists to combine expertise from all the different NOCI partners and disciplines on standardizing organ-on-chip design. Congratulations to all NOCI authors, especially first authors Dennis Nahon and Renée Moerkens. From the NOCI brain-theme we worked with JP Frimat from LUMC, and Erasmus MC colleagues Cristina Gontan and Eva Niggl. Bas and Femke are co-authors from our lab.

Full-text access here: https://rdcu.be/dR0sK

July 2024: after years in the making our adherent cortical organoid model is now finally published in eLife! Really impressed with their transparant review process.
Congratulations to the whole team and especially to first author Mark van der Kroeg who pioneered this work.
We will submit an improved version of the manuscript, but in the meantime, everyone can read the reviewed preprint here:

July 2024: Lab day at the beach was great fun! Also saying goodbye to Michell who finished her internship for the Neuroscience and Cognition Master program Utrecht, but glad she will stay around for a writing assignment. Good luck Michell!

June 2024: Hilde, Maurits and Femke attended the FENS forum in Vienna, the large bi-annual European Neuroscience conference. Very inspiring lectures and so nice to meet many colleagues and friends in the field.

June 2024: Femke was interviewed for this piece in Dutch popular science magazine KIJK about the conciousness of brain organoids (spoiler alert: there is none so far!)

June 2024: A month full of travel, we had the annual meeting of our 3D BrAIn consortium in beautiful Genova. Thanks to our partners at 3Brain and UNIGE for organising!

June 2024: Our lab attended the Dutch Neuroscience Meeting in Tiel, with talks from Hilde and Femke and poster presentations from Sakshi and Maurits.

June 2024: The annual Troppo Breve retreat from the NOCI consortium was fantastic as always, great to see everyone discussing great science and to spend time together in the beautiful Friesian landscape with skutsje sailing!

April 2024: New paper out of our collaborators in the Ellis group in Toronto, Canada. A nice story using our hiPSC-derived astrocyte protocol to study astrocyte release of extracellular vesicles and their miRNA cargo that can influence neuronal gene expression. Thanks for the nice collaboration!

March 2024: Very good news that the NWO Gravitation grant was awarded to the iCNS project, a large national consortium coordinated by Inge Huitinga at the Brainbank/Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience in Amsterdam. Our lab will contribute stem cell modelling to validate findings in living human brain cells. The project will combine many disciplines such as the development of a ‘brain atlas’ of psychiatric symptoms based on patient post mortem material and novel technologies in chemistry, transcriptomics, microscopy and molecular biology. Very exciting!

February 2024: The 3D-BrAIn project is nicely coming along, read more about it on the dedicated website.

February 2024: Pablo Sprunken started his BSc internship in our lab from the Avans Hogeschool in Breda. Welcome Pablo!

January 2024: Two New Years party’s, one at our department of Psychiatry (ApresPsy) and a pot luck dinner that resulted in some awesome dishes with all the different nationalities in our group!

December 2023: Not all news is happy. We are sad to see Sophie leave the lab, we wish her all the best in health and luck and hope to see her back soon!

December 2023: Sinterklaas lab party!

November 2023: María Madejon Sanchez and Deniz Gülyurt will start their Erasmus MC Neuroscience Master internships in our lab. Also Michell Forgione will start her internship for the Neuroscience and Cognition Master program Utrecht.

Welcome María, Deniz and Michell!

September 2023: Femke chaired a session on Cellular Models in Neuropsychiatry at the PORT for Health Neuroscience Conference in Wroclaw, Poland.

This visit was also in the context of the Horizon Europe SAME-NeuroID project and a nice opportunity to present our work, visit the labs at PORT Lukasiewicz and the beautiful city of Wroclaw. Thanks to the organizers for a great conference!

September 2023: Willemijn Hoogenberg started her internship in our lab from the BML program at Hogeschool Rotterdam.

Welcome Willemijn!

August 2023: Maurits gave a great talk on scRNA analysis of human astrocytes at the ACE SCORE day at the Bibliohtheektheater in Rotterdam August 31^st.

July 2023: Juliette was awarded an ENW-XS Grant from NWO! An interesting project bridging her expertise in DNA repair from her PhD work and her current work on human stem cell-derived neurons. How does DNA-repair work in post-mitotic neurons? The award received a lot of attention online at Amazing Erasmus MC and OPEN Rotterdam. Well deserved, congratulations Juliette!

July 2023: Lab outing, games and boat BBQ! Also saying ‘goodbye’ to Esmée, Nikki and Carlos who did a fantastic job in their master internships in our lab. Good luck on next adventures!

July 2023: Euro Glia meeting in Berlin. Great meeting, catching up with a lot of people and excellent poster by Sakshi presenting work on microglia in our Create2Solve project.

June 2023: Erasmus MC Picnic

June 2023: Kick-off meeting for the 3D-BrAIn project, finally meeting in person!

April 2023: Official start of the 3D-BrAIn project! Check out the new website and logo designed by Catalyze.

www.3dbrain-project.eu

March 2023: Review paper out in Neuroscience Applied on guidelines for using hiPSCs to model neuropsychiatric disorders

Collaborative paper with a large group of hiPSC modelling labs

March 2023: Femke, Juliette and Hilde presented at the annual NVvP meeting (Nederlandse Vereniging voor Psychiatrie).

February 2023: Julia Christiaanse started her internship in our lab for her BSc Bioinformatics at Hogeschool Leiden.

Welcome Julia!

January 2023: Paper out in Cell Reports on improving precise gene editing

Collaboration with the Tijsterman group, Juliette performed validation experiments to improve precise CRISPR/Cas9 HDR editing in human iPSCs. The paper was also covered by the Dutch newspaper NRC.

January 2023: Carlos Jiménez Gonzáles starts his internship in our lab for his MSc Neurobiology at Radboud UMC Nijmegen

Welcome Carlos!

January 2023 Late Sinterklaas lab party

December 2022 EU Pathfinder funding for 3D BrAIn project

We are very excited to start a new project in April 2023 together with Alessandro Maccione from 3Brain, Silvia Cappello from LMU in Munich, Michele Piana and Cristina Campi from University of Genua. With help from Catalyze.

November 2022: Sitara Chakrasali starts her internship in our lab for her MSc Neuroscience at Erasmus MC

Welcome Sitara!

October 2022: Nikki Kolsters starts her internship in our lab for her MSc Neurobiology at Radboud UMC Nijmegen

Welcome Nikki!

November 2022: Sophie Cohen starts as a PhD student in our lab

Sophie has an MSc Neuroscience background and will work on hiPSC models for schizophrenia. Welcome Sophie!

June 2022 Lab Outing at Mooie Boules and lab BBQ

May 2022 Create2Solve 3D-MICro Brain meeting

We received 5year funding from the MKMD ZonMw Create2Solve program for a project to create reproducible small scale brain model cultures with all major brain cell types in cortical adherent organoids, including myelinating oligodendrocytes and microglia. The resulting 3D MICro-brain model (3D Myelination and Inflammation Cortical Organoids) can be used for phenotype and therapeutic screening. We work together with industry for this project, including Core Life Analytics for advanced image analysis software. We had a great first in person meeting in Rotterdam.