01/07/2026
📢 FINAL SPEAKER ANNOUNCEMENT
It is our great pleasure to introduce the final speaker of the Biotechnology Summer School 2026 - Niels Geijsen.
Niels Geijsen is Professor of Developmental Biology and Regenerative Medicine and Chair of the Department of Anatomy and Embryology at the Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands.
He received his PhD in Molecular Biology from Utrecht University. In 2004, he established his research group at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, where he also became a principal faculty member of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. His work there focused on pluripotent stem cell biology and gene modification, laying the foundation for his later research on modeling and treating human genetic disorders. In 2010, he moved his laboratory to the Hubrecht Institute, and in 2020 he was appointed Chair of the Department of Anatomy & Embryology at Leiden University Medical Center.
Dr Geijsen’s research focuses on developing new technologies to understand human skeletal muscle development, homeostasis, and regeneration, particularly in the context of genetic muscle disorders such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy and facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy.
His group develops innovative strategies for the delivery of gene-editing systems into target cells and has demonstrated the use of these technologies to introduce recombinant CRISPR-Cas ribonucleoprotein complexes into a broad range of cell types in vitro. A major focus of his current work is the development of efficient and specific gene-editing approaches to repair disease-causing mutations and enable the therapeutic application of these technologies in vivo.
We are honoured to welcome him to BSS 2026 and look forward to the insights he will share with our participants.
Międzyuczelniany Wydział Biotechnologii UG i GUMed
