Roderick Beijersbergen named professor by special appointment of Functional Genomics

Roderick Beijersbergen. Picture by Kirsten van Santen - Dr Roderick Beijersbergen is named professor by special appointment of Functional Genomics at the Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences at the University of Amsterdam (SILS-UvA) per 1 May. The chair was established on behalf of the Netherlands Cancer Institute. Beijersbergen will combine the professorship by special appointment with his work as group leader at the Netherlands Cancer Institute. This position allows him to bring together different technologies that will enable complex screening models for investigating cancer and other diseases. Roderick Beijersbergen's research group focuses on the development and application of large-scale screening technologies for the identification of novel targets for cancer therapy. With the development of the pooled screening technology, originally for RNA interference and more recently implemented for CRISPR/CAS9 screening, it is now possible to manipulate all genes in the human genome to study their role in cancer cell behaviour and therapy response.