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Andrea van Dam

NOVO NORDISK POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH FELLOW (2017-2021)

  • Project: Unravelling the role of Hedgehog signalling in human obesity and body fat distribution

Andrea was awarded a Novo Nordisk Postdoctoral Fellowship starting in 2017, working with Dr Costas Christodoulides and Professor Fredrik Karpe in OCDEM. During her fellowship, she used human genetic and physiological approaches, accompanied by studies in cellular models to better understand the mechanisms by which genetic variants in developmental pathway genes modulate fat distribution. Her main project focused on a variant in the HHIP locus associated with fat distribution in GWAS. Paired abdominal and gluteal fat biopsies were obtained from human individuals that were recruited by genotype, and single-cell RNA-sequencing of the stromal vascular fraction was performed to identify celltype-specific mechanisms driving the phenotype.

Following her fellowship, Andrea started specialist training for clinical biochemistry at the ETZ, JBZ and Radboud UMC hospitals in the Netherlands.