NWO Tulp fund attracts top researcher to MaCSBio

To keep up with the worldwide race for knowledge and innovation, the Netherlands needs more highly talented scientists. Therefore, the ministry of OCW and NWO started the Tulp Fund to enable non-EU researchers to continue their careers in the Netherlands. Irina Mohorianu is one of them. She just started working at the Maastricht Centre for Systems Biology and Bioinformatics of Maastricht University’s Faculty of Science and Engineering. 

Before coming to Maastricht, Irina worked at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge as well as the renowned Turing Institute. She specialises in unravelling gene-gene interactions using data science. “Thirty years ago, the scientific community was engaged in a race to sequence and decode genomes. The vast amount of data generated in the interim pointed out that the linear DNA sequence might not be enough to explain the working of the genome. We try to answer a different question; how do genes interact with each other to give rise to the diverse phenotypes we observe?

My group is focused on modelling the dynamics and causality of the networks that form the scaffold of gene-gene interactions, thus understanding mechanistic details behind diseases, heterogeneity across populations, or developmental processes. Pinpointing subtle particularities, at DNA, RNA or protein levels, can propose solutions for personalised medicine, or for uncovering the processes that led to the selection of plant varieties”, she says.

At the Department of Advanced Computing Sciences Joël Karel and his colleges obtained a NWO Open Competition ENW-XS grant for their research into electrocardiographic imaging. Joël explains the goal of this research project: “A conventional electrocardiogram shows when the heart is electrically active. Electrocardiographic imaging (ECGI) shows where this activity originates from, and how it spreads across the heart. This enables physicians to diagnose cardiac arrhythmias more accurately and to better plan treatments. However, the clinical use of ECGI is limited, among other factors, by the need for precise knowledge of the positions of all electrodes. In this project, we investigate a new form of self-calibration, in which small electrode patches determine their position directly from the measured signals. This could remove a major practical barrier to ECGI. If successful, it would make the technology simpler, faster, and more affordable, bringing advanced cardiac diagnostics within reach of primary care, ambulatory monitoring, and ultimately even home-based care.”