Floris Foijer

Floris Foijer obtained his PhD degree at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam in 2006. His PhD research in the lab of Prof. Hein te Riele focused on alternative mechanisms of cell cycle arrest in cells that are predisposed to cancer. He uncovered a checkpoint in the G2 phase of the cell cycle that allows these cells to arrest, but also showed that when this arrest is alleviated, such cells become chromosomal unstable, thus predisposing them further to unconstrained proliferation. For his postdoc, funded by the Dutch Cancer Society (KWF fellow), Foijer went to the lab of Prof. Peter Sorger at Harvard Medical School in Boston, USA, where he pursued the link between cancer and chromosome instability further. In Prof. Sorger’s lab, he developed murine models for chromosomal instability in the skin and the mammary gland and developed an interest in high resolution intravital imaging. In 2008, the need for more sophisticated murine models for high resolution imaging led him to the lab of Prof. Allan Bradley, at the Wellcome Trust Sanger institute in Cambridge, UK, where he, funded by a EMBO long term fellowship, started engineering a murine model to track chromosomal instability in living animals over time.

In 2011, Floris Foijer moved to ERIBA to start his own lab focusing on the in vivo consequences of chromosomal instability.[vimeo id=”52142398″ align=”center” mode=”normal” autoplay=”no”]