Can zebrafish provide a fast, sensitive in vivo vertebrate model for identifying novel mechanisms of Ewing sarcoma progression and for development of new anticancer compounds in a time- and cost-effective manner?

How to identify patients at risk of developing devastating, metastatic disease and facilitate the development of personalised treatment for prostate cancer patients?

Promotor: F.H.J. Redig, Co-Promotor: W.T.F. den Hollander

Promotor: Prof.dr. G.R. de Snoo, Co-promotores: Dr. ing. M.G. Vijver, J.P.M. Vink

This thesis focuses on two processes involved in fighting infections: metabolism and immune cell motility and navigation.

This thesis reports on the influence of induction programs on beginning teachers’ well-being and professional development, and the essential characteristics of an induction program. These topics were explored by means of an interview study and large scale survey study.

PhD defence

This dissertation reports on the pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) of science teachers during a professional development program. This research intended to help us understand why and how teachers make their classroom decisions as they teach science.

Arco Timmermans, Professor by special appointment Public Affairs at Leiden University, brought sience to practice by designing an “ideal” academic education programme on public affairs, to be embedded and taught at the graduate level.

This research project adresses the question how local and traditional European forms of parrhesiastic theater— events, actions, and performances staged by characters who courageously speak their minds through scenes of excess and laughter, that take place in public view and incite the spectator’s agency…

In this research project characteristics of effective instructional development were identified that are appealing to medical teachers and relevant for medical education.

Pharmaceutical companies, governments and the general public have become increasingly aware that animal models used in drug testing lack vital aspects to serve as an accurate representation of human biology. As models of the human body should become more physiologically relevant, animal models no longer…

Beginning teachers often experience difficulties making activating lessons. This study investigates how and if the practical teaching model can offer them a hand in learning to design lessons.

Cholesterol influences many pathways, including serving as precursor for adrenal steroidogenesis. Imbalance of cholesterol levels has been implicated in several diseases including cardiovascular diseases and its underlying pathology, atherosclerosis.

PhD student Sung-Shik Jongmans of Leiden University and Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica investigated a new programming method to simplify this. On 3 March 2016, he graduated with the exceptional predicate 'cum laude' on his dissertation 'Automata-Theoretic Protocol Programming'. His results are interesting…

Source: Structure , Volume 22, Issue 8, pp. 1120-1139 (2014)

This paper describes two synthetic lipid models designed to replace human stratum corneum (SC) in studies of the impact of volatile organic chemicals on the molecular organization of the skin barrier lipids.

Parkinson's disease is the second most common neurodegenerative disease in the world. One of its symptoms is the loss of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra pars compacta.

Nonparametric Bayes for high-dimensional models: contraction, credible sets, computations

M. Danhof, Co-promotor: O.E. Della Pasqua

This dissertation is concerned with the development of grammar. Starting from a usage-based perspective, which holds that children use domain-general learning mechanisms to acquire the grammatical patterns of their mother tongue, Beekhuizen shows how to operationalize various concepts from this tradition…

We describe certain birational modifications of nodal relative curves over a regular base of arbitrary dimension.

Promotor: Prof.dr. M. Danhof, Co-Promotor: J. de Jongh

Behrouz Karoubi defended his thesis on 15 June 2016

In this thesis, we will utilize embryonic zebrafish tumour models to understand the interaction between engrafted human cancer cells and macrophages from the host, test drug administration modalities and anti-cancer efficacies of newly-developed PDT and PACT compounds, and test a light-triggered liposomal…

This dissertation provides a formal description of the relationship between diatopic/diachronic micro-variation and phonologization through analysis of the phonetic/phonological properties of unstressed vowel reduction and vowel insertion in two Northern Italian dialects.

The aim of this project is to explore the use of statistical interaction models to quantify cross-omics and omics-drug interactions in large-scale clinical and experimental datasets

In the studies described in this study, we introduce a novel ex vivo human skin barrier repair model. To develop this, we removed the upper layer of the skin, the stratum corneum (SC) by a reproducible cyanoacrylate stripping technique.

Mouse models are commonly used to assess the immunogenicity of therapeutic proteins and to investigate the immunological processes leading to antidrug antibodies. The aim of this work was to develop a transgenic (TG) Balb/c mouse model for evaluating the immunogenicity of recombinant human insulin (insulin)…

To what end and how does Plautus constantly underline the Helleni(sti)c provenance of his art? How does this aspect relate the author’s originality?

This thesis consists of two main parts. The first part (Chapters 2 and 3) deals with a class of Markov process called Quasi-Skipfree (QSF) processes.

Exploring the mechanism of targeted nanoparticle-mediated drug delivery using the zebrafish model

Promotores: Prof.dr. G.R. de Snoo & Dr. R. Heijungs

Barrier function is the natural role of the skin. The lipid matrix present in the outermost layer of the skin, the stratum corneum is important for this function.

In design optimization problems, engineers typically handcraft design representations based on personal expertise, which leaves a fingerprint of the user experience in the optimization data. Thus, learning this notion of experience as transferrable design features has potential to improve the performance…

Despite being the object of intense study, embryonic development has been difficult to model due to a number of reasons. First, complex tissues can be comprised of many cell types, of which we probably only know a subset.

In this research project Nizar Rohana analyzes and reflects on taqsīm recordings by two leading figures of ‘ūd playing who were pillars of modern Arabic music, namely the Egyptians Muḥammad al-Qaṣabjī (1898-1964) and Riyāḍ al-Sunbāṭī (1906-1981).

Several techniques are explored for going beyond the born-oppenheimer static surface model for molecule-surface reactions.

Cellular stress response pathways are activated upon exposure to chemicals and help organisms deal with various molecular dangers (e.g. oxidative stress). When these pathways become hyper-activated an adverse response takes place and cells die, which may lead to organism-level toxicity such as drug-induced…

This thesis focuses on the role of chemokine receptors CXCR3 and CCR2 in the inflammatory process and infection control using the zebrafish model.

The development process of any software has become extremely important not just in the IT industry, but in almost every business or domain of research.

In this thesis it is posed that the central object of preference discovery is a co-creative process in which the Other can be represented by a machine. It explores efficient methods to enhance introverted intuition using extraverted intuition's communication lines.

How can the transport of molecules in living cells help to target medicines at exactly the right place?

Multicellular giant algae Chara species have been widely used in physiological studies for decades.

Promotores: H. Schiessel, G.T. Barkema

Promotor: Prof.dr. M.K. Richardson

We aim to gain a better understanding of the natural disease progression of ALS in order to improve clinical trial design and analysis and to support drug discovery and clinical development of new drugs.

The overall aim of the project is to investigate effective ways to strengthen vocational identity of at-risk adolescents in order to contribute to a successful transition from late secondary to post secondary lower vocational education or to work.

He’s a fast and animated speaker, which is only logical because Gerard van Westen is driving an express train. His destination? A virtual human, consisting of algorithms that predict what an administered substance will do in the body. The train is already a long way down the line and the pharmaceutical…