BioSB Young Investigator Award 2024

And the winner is!

BioSB yearly presents an award at the BioSB conference for a young researcher who has significantly contributed to the bioinformatics or the systems biology research community in the Netherlands during his / her PhD. Find more information on this award here.

This year the Young Investigator Award committee 2024 chose
Elleke Tissink  as the winner of the BioSB Young Investigator Award 2024.

Elleke Tissink defended her doctoral thesis "United efforts: combining neuroimaging and genetics to unravel the human brain" in September 2023 and is currently working at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience as a post-doctoral researcher. Elleke will receive the YIA2024 on the 18th of June at 15:30, after which she will give an honorary lecture.

Biography

Elleke Tissink is a neuroscientist and geneticist with the aim to contribute meaningfully to the broader understanding of genetic influences on brain structure/function and mental health. She pursued a BSc degree in Psychology at Utrecht University and continued her studies there as a MSc student in Neuroscience & Cognition in 2016. She gained her first experience working with neuroimaging data in the group of Prof. Iris Sommer at the UMC Utrecht and later moved to Munich in 2018 to gain experience working with (epi)genetic data in the group of Prof. Elisabeth Binder at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry. Elleke was motivated to combine her neuroimaging and genetic research experience during her PhD and started her position in 2019 at the Complex Trait Genetics Lab and Connectome Lab of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her research focused on the heritable influences on brain measures obtained with MRI, and was supervised by Prof. Danielle Posthuma and Prof. Martijn van den Heuvel. In 2022, she visited Oslo for a research stay with Prof. Ole Andreassen at the Norwegian Centre for Mental Disorder Research. She defended her doctoral thesis in September 2023, after which she joined the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience (Amsterdam) as a post-doctoral researcher in the group of Prof. Eus van Someren in 2024.

United efforts: combining neuroimaging and genetics to unravel the human brain

Abstract of lecture Several developments have created a unique opportunity for scientists to advance our understanding of the heritable influences on brain structure and function. The availability of large-scale population studies enables the search across the entire genome for variants that explain individual differences in a wide range of brain characteristics derived from different MRI modalities. The genes involved are potentially relevant to the condition(s) the brain characteristics are associated with and this potential can be exploited by combining neuroimaging and genetics data. This talk presents several neuroimaging genetics studies aimed to improve understanding into the genetic architecture and mechanistic underpinnings of neuroimaging-derived phenotypes and their genetic overlap with brain-related conditions.

~ ​​We thank all group leaders and nominees for their efforts. ~