Mariëlle obtained a Ph.D. at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich), Switzerland, where she employed a rewritten bacterial genome to expose gene regulatory elements and to formulate design principles to program biological systems. As a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Mariëlle aims to deduce and employ gene regulatory networks in human cells at RNA isoform resolution to improve human health. Dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) is a heart disease that might benefit from this approach, as long isoforms contribute to the molecular pathology. Mariëlle has set out to develop technologies to perturb and measure these isoforms in cardiomyocytes, cardiac muscle cells, which will allow to find intervention points to alleviate DCM.
mvk [at] stanford.edu
Photo Credit: Gian Marco Castelberg.