Dr L.J. de Windt
Leon de Windt is professor of Molecular Cardiovascular Biology at Maastricht University and the recipient of several Awards, including the Louis N. and Arnold M. Katz Basic Science Research Award for Young Investigators from the American Heart Association; the VENI, VIDI and VICI career development awards from the Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research (NW0); The Fondation Leducq Transatlantic Network of Excellence; the 2012 Outstanding Achievement Award of the ESC Council for Basic Cardiovascular Science and the 2012 Galenus Research Prize.
In 2013, he received an ERC Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council and became coordinator of the Dutch CVON-ARENA consortium to support his work. In 2015, he received an NW0-VICI grant to expand his research activities. Many alumni from his group have successfully started their own research laboratories, fulfill executive industrial functions or became clinician-researchers as the future generation of leaders in medicine.
Leon de Windt is professor of Molecular Cardiovascular Biology at Maastricht University and his research aims to understand how programs of cellular differentiation and morphogenesis are affected in the processes leading to heart failure. Chronic heart failure is a progressive disorder of the heart muscle that affects all vital organs, ultimately resulting in loss in quality of life, frequent hospitalizations and a reduced life span. His ultimate goal is to dissect the genomic pathways of heart disease and transform this information to devise the next generation of pharmacological therapies for acquired heart disease in humans.
Leon de Windt was born in Willemstad, on the Island of Curaçao (Netherlands Antilles) in 1970. He received a Master degree in Molecular Biology from Utrecht University in 1994 and a Ph.D. in Cardiovascular Physiology from Maastricht University in 1999. He carried out his postdoctoral studies in the laboratory of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator Jeffery D. Molkentin at Children's Hospital Medical Center in Cincinnati OH, USA (http://www.hhmi.org/scientists/jeffery-d-molkentin) as an American Heart Association Fellow.
In 2002 he was appointed group leader at the Hubrecht Institute in Utrecht (www.hubrecht.eu) an Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences. In 2008 he was appointed Associate Professor at the University Medical Center Utrecht, the Netherlands and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences. In 2010 he moved to Maastricht where he is appointed as Professor of Molecular Cardiovascular Biology at the Department of Cardiology, CARIM School for Cardiovascular Diseases, Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences, Maastricht University.
Dr L.J. de Windt
Leon de Windt is professor of Molecular Cardiovascular Biology at Maastricht University, Principal Investigator at CARIM School for Cardiovascular Diseases where he runs a research program on Gene Regulatory Mechanisms in Heart Failure. Leon de Windt is also Board member of the Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences (FHML). On a national level, he is a coordinator of the Dutch CVON-ARENA consortium, the largest Dutch Heart Foundation funded research consortium on heart failure.