Jannie Wijnen

The mission of my research is to use metabolic imaging in the diagnosis and treatment planning of metabolic disorders and cancer. I believe that direct measurement of tissue metabolism in the patient will lead to better understanding of the disease in the individual patient and can therefore faster translate to a change in diagnosis and consequently treatment, to better help the patient. I strive to invent and make available advanced metabolic imaging methods to aid diagnosis and treatment of the most vulnerable group of patients; children with metabolic diseases and solid tumours, who may greatly benefit from non-invasive metabolic characterisation of their disease.

I have a background in Biomedical Engineering and obtained my PhD in biomedicine on the topic of magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) of human brain tumours at the Radboud University Nijmegen-Medical Centre. After a short post-doc position at the University Medical Centre Utrecht (UMCU) (Marina van Damma Grant), I obtained the Niels Stensen fellowship which enabled me to work as a postdoc to learn about pre-clinical research in oncology in the In-vivo Cellular and Molecular Imaging Center (ICMIC) from the department of radiology in the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, (Baltimore, USA) in 2011. I continued my post-doctoral research on advanced metabolic imaging methods at high magnetic field for human applications in the brain and body in the Leiden University Medical Centre and UMCU in 2012, and since 2019 as Associate Professor in the high field MR research group in the UCMU. Being part of this group, I have access to a large multidisciplinary team of experts on MRI and unique MRI equipment (7 Tesla MR system, MetaScanner). I guide and supervise master and PhD students in projects that make use of this equipment to study neurological diseases, metabolic diseases and cancer both in adults and children.