Isabelle Cleynen, PhD

Laboratory for Complex Genetics

Isabelle Cleynen graduated as a master in biomedical sciences at KU Leuven in 2003. In 2007 she obtained her PhD in Biomedical Sciences. From 2007 until 2015, she was an FWO-funded postdoctoral researcher at the IBD research lab in Leuven, where her scientific work focused on genetics of inflammatory bowel disease, and on the functional and clinical relevance of the genetic variants in IBD. During this time, she spent 15 months at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK, where she worked on finding the genetic determinants of Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis subphenotypes in the ca 35,000 patient dataset of the International IBD genetics consortium.

Since 2015, she is Professor at the Laboratory of Complex Genetics, Department of Human Genetics, KU Leuven, Belgium. The work of her group focuses on the genetics of complex disease, mainly inflammatory bowel disease, and neurodegenerative disorders (Alzheimer disease, Parkinson disease…). The group employs a translational genetics approach in the context of specific clinical questions in terms of (early) diagnosis, disease subtypes, disease progression, therapy options…

For more information, visit http://gbiomed.kuleuven.be/apps/cme/