Maaike van Putten

Dr. Maaike van Putten is a postdoctoral fellow in the exon skip group of the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), The Netherlands. She specialized in working with experimental animals investigating muscle function, pathology and behaviour. She performed her PhD research at the department of Human Genetics of the LUMC under supervision of Prof. Dr. G.J.B. van Ommen and Dr. A. Aartsma-Rus. Here she studied functional performance and pathology in various animal models for Duchenne muscular dystrophy. In February 2013, she successfully defended her thesis titled: “The influence of low dystrophin levels on disease pathology in mouse models for Duchenne muscular dystrophy”. To increase her technical expertise further, Maaike investigated physiological parameters in Duchenne mouse models as a postdoctoral fellow in the group of Prof. Dr. D.J. Wells at the Royal Veterinary College in London in 2012. For this work she received financial support from the Bontius Stichting (Leiden, the Netherlands). In 2013 she returned to work as a postdoc in the lab of Dr. A. Aartsma-Rus. Her current work focuses on studying skeletal muscle and heart function and pathology in aged animal models. She has published 13 articles (8 as a first author, 2 as last author), presented her work at several international conferences and was awarded with 4 fellowships and 2 poster awards at various World Muscle Society congresses. She also successfully applied for several grant applications starting when she was a Master student.