Jeroen Bakkers received his PhD in 2000 from Leiden University, The Netherlands. During this time he was introduced in the zebrafish system and used it to study the role of glycosyltransferases during early vertebrate development. He continued his work on zebrafish development as a postdoc in the lab of Matthias Hammerschmidt at the Max-Planck Institute for Immunbiology in Freiburg, Germany. Here he started his work on Bmp and Wnt signaling during zebrafish gastrulation and isolated p63 (a member of the p53 tumor suppressor family) as a direct target of Bmp signalling. In 2003 he was appointed at the Hubrecht Institute initially as a junior staff member and in 2008 as a senior staff member and initiated here his work on heart development using zebrafish. In 2008 he was awarded a VIDI career grant from the Dutch science organization NWO and in 2015 he was appointed as Professor of Molecular Cardiogenetics at the UMC Utrecht.

j.bakkers(at)hubrecht.eu