Joyce van de Leemput, PhD

• University of Professional Education, Nijmegen, Netherlands, BS, Biochemistry, 2001
• University of Professional Education, Nijmegen, Netherlands, BS, Biotechnology, 2001
• vrije University Amsterdam, Netherlands, MS, Neurosciences, 2004
• University College London, United Kingdom, PhD, 2009, Neurogenetics
• National Institute on Aging, Bethesda MD, 2009, PhD fellowship, Neurogenetics
• Neural Stem Cell Institute, Rensselaer (NY), postdoctoral study, cortical development 2013
• University of California, San Diego, Sand Diego (CA), postdoctoral study, cortical development & neuropsychiatry, 2015

Dr. van de Leemput is a neuroscientist and her research has focused on brain development and neuro(psychiatric) disorders. Her graduate project at the National Institute on Aging used classic genetics/genomics, including linkage analysis, to identify disease-causing variants in mice, humans and dogs. During her postdoctoral work she added the use of transcriptomics data from human cell culture models, in collaboration with the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and postmortem tissue to gain insight in the underlying molecular mechanisms. Further, she used human induced pluripotent stem cell (hiPSC)-derived models of neurons, and astrocytes, to study the functional implications of the molecular-genetic variants in collaboration with the Salk Institute.

Over the years, Dr. van de Leemput has dedicated gradually more time to scientific writing and communication, something she very much enjoys. This has made for a natural transition to her current position as scientific writer and editor at the Han lab which uses Drosophila to model various human genetic diseases and for the Center for Precision Disease Modeling at UMSOM.

neurosciences, neurogenetics, transcriptomics, human brain development, neurons, glia, astrocytes, human induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells; science writing and editing; Drosophila, human precision disease models

Fu, Y*, Huang X*, Zhang P, van de Leemput J, Han Z. (2020) Single-cell RNA sequencing identifies novel cell types in Drosophila blood. J Genet Genomics. In Press.

van de Leemput J*, Boles NC*, Kiehl TR, Corneo B, Lederman P, Menon V, Lee C, Martinez RA, Levi BP, Thompson CL, Yao S, Kaykas A, Temple S, Fasano CA. (2014) CORTECON: A temporal transcriptome analysis of in vitro human cerebral cortex development from human embryonic stem cells. Neuron. 83(1):51-68. PubMed PMID: 24991954.

van de Leemput J, Wavrant-De Vrièze F, Rafferty I, Bras JM, Fisher EMC, Hardy J, Singleton AB, Houlden H. (2010) Sequencing analysis of ITPR1 in an autosomal dominant spinocerebellar ataxia type III (ADCA III) cohort. Movement Disorders. 25(6):763-765. PubMed PMID: 20437544.

van de Leemput J*, Chandran J*, Knight MA, Holtzclaw LA, Scholz S, Cookson MR, Houlden H, Gwinn-Hardy K, Fung H-C, Lin X, Hernandez D, Simon-Sanchez J, Wood NW, Giunti P, Rafferty I, Hardy J, Storey E, Gardner RJM,  Forrest SM, Fisher EMC, Russell JT, Cai H, Singleton AB. (2007) Deletion at ITPR1 underlies ataxia in mice and spinocerebellar ataxia 15 in humans. PLoS Genetics. 3(6):e108. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.0030108. PubMed PMID: 17590087.

(* co first authors)