Biography

Erik Jacob Vrij, originally from Rotterdam, but grew up in the peaceful district of the Netherlands named Twente. He studied Mechanical Engineering at the University of Twente, after he did a Master in Biomedical Engineering with a focus on Tissue Engineering. For his Master’s internship he was involved in a study using a perfusion bioreactor to dynamically seed Mesenchymal Stem Cells in PLA/G5 and calcium phosphate scaffolds at the institute for BioEngineering of Catalonia in Barcelona. His Master’s assignment was done under supervision of Nicolas Rivron in the Tissue Regeneration group of MIRA at the University of Twente on the use of microfabrication technologies for building platforms to generate and screen multicellular systems to investigate questions relative to embryogenesis, tissue development and disease. This work he continues as a PhD student. In his spare time he likes to put his own multicellular system to practice in music and dancing salsa.

Research Statement

In the Rivron laboratory I develop high throughput screening and high content imaging assays, which I employ for the optimization of self-organization processes involved in the formation of organs and organisms. My main focus of study is the formation of murine early embryonic development in vitro using stem cell-based 3D multicellular models. Such models with complex cellular organization require high-throughput culture tools to provide robust and reproducible read-outs. These in-house microfabricated platforms serve as tools that allow the massively parallelized culture and imaging of multicellular models with single cell resolution.