Gert-Jan B. van Ommen - Chairman of the scientific & clinical supervisory board
last update: May 17, 2012
Prof. Gert-Jan B. van Ommen, Ph.D, (chair) is head of the Department of Human Genetics of Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), and founder of the Leiden Genome Technology Center. He is Director of the Center for Medical Systems Biology, one of four Centers of Excellence established in 2003 by the Netherlands Genome Initiative and coordinator of the national Dutch biobank integration infrastructure BBMRI-NL. He is Editor-in-chief of the European Journal of Human Genetics and past president of HUGO and of the European and Dutch Societies of Human Genetics. He is a member of several National, EU and HUGO committees in the fields of Genetics, Innovative Health Care, Genomics, Bioinformatics, Biobanking, Ethics and IP issues. He is treasurer of the of the international Public Population Project in Genomics (P3G), and board member of the Medical Genetics Centre, and the Center of Biomedical Genetics. Prof. van Ommen has as major research interests neuromuscular and neurodegenerative diseases, with a focus on Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, and Huntington's Disease. As of 1998, his group has been pioneering the exon-skipping approach as a therapy of Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy.