Inge R. Holtman PhD

During her master (Behavioral Cognitive Neurosciences; 2008-2010, University of Groningen), Inge R. Holtman travelled to the internationally renowned lab of Prof. Dr. Michael Meaney at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, where her interest in epigenetics of brain diseases emerged. After that she successfully obtained funding from BCN-graduate school that enabled her to pursue a PhD.

During her doctoral studies (2011 – 2016, University of Groningen), she specialized in bioinformatics and NGS-data analysis approaches to study the role of microglia in brain development, aging and disease, across different species at the lab of Dr. Erik Boddeke and Dr. Bart Eggen. Additionally, she participated in a large number of international collaborations that successfully resulted in publications in peer reviewed scientific journals. Her PhD was awarded cum laude.

As a postdoctoral researcher (2016 – 2019), she worked in the critically acclaimed lab of Dr. Chris Glass at the University of California, San Diego. This work was co-sponsored by the Gemmy & Mibeth Tichelaar awards from the Dutch MS Research Foundation. Here she specialized in the effects of natural genetic variation on expression and enhancer signatures of CNS cell types and tissue-macrophages; and the 3D-structure of the chromatin by applying a wide-range of computational tools. In 2018, she was awarded a Veni fellowship by the Science Domain from the Dutch NWO to focus on the role of transcriptional regulation of microglia in Alzheimer’s Disease.

In 2020, Dr. Holtman successfully pursued a Rosalind Franklin Fellowship that enabled her to become a junior group leader in the section of Molecular Neurobiology. Here she continues to study the effect of natural genetic variation on susceptibility to brain diseases. In collaboration with the Netherlands Brain Bank, she established the Netherlands Neurogenomics Database, which is supported by the ‘Stichting Vrienden van het Herseninstituut’. The aim of this project is to integrate the extensive clinical and neuropathological data of the NHB, with a multi-omics map in order to study the effects of genetic variation on brain disease using state-of-the-art computational and machine learning  approaches.