Lodewijk Sandkuijl chair for Prof. dr. Cisca Wijmenga (2017)

Cisca Wijmenga has been appointed to the Lodewijk Sandkuijl chair, awarded to her by the Executive Board of the University of Groningen in 2017 in recognition of her exceptional contribution to research.

Cisca Wijmenga

Cisca Wijmenga has been working at the UMCG as a full professor of Human Genetics since 2007. Early on in her career, she developed a fascination for the wealth of information hidden within our DNA. As a post-doc researcher, she had the privilege of working in the laboratory of American geneticist Francis Collins who was, at that time, leading the Human Genome Project: the consortium that sequenced the first human genome. Wijmenga is a member of a wide range of academic associations, including the Netherlands Royal Academy of Sciences and the Fryske Akademy.

Lodewijk Sandkuijl

The chair is named after Lodewijk Sandkuijl (1953-2002), who helped to lay the foundations of statistical genetics. He conceived and developed methods to unravel the hereditary factors involved in complex diseases. Wijmenga worked closely with Sandkuijl from the early nineties until his unexpected death in 2002, and it was actually at her suggestion that this chair was named after him.