Sascha Hoogendoorn, PhD
Bio
Sascha Hoogendoorn was born and raised in the Netherlands. She is a tenure-track assistant professor at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. In her spare time, she loves reading, being outdoors, hiking and camping, and spending time with her husband and three kids.
From the Netherlands..
Sascha's interest in the interdisciplinary field of Chemical Biology started during her B.Sc. in Chemistry at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands. She decided to subsequently combine her M.Sc. in Chemistry with a B.Sc. in Bio-Pharmaceutical Sciences. She combined internships in Bio-organic Synthesis (Overkleeft lab, Leiden University) and Molecular Pharmacology (Devi lab, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, USA) to study and perturb GPCR signaling.
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She stayed in the Overkleeft lab to pursue a PhD degree, working on an interdisciplinary research project that combined organic synthesis, biochemistry, and cell biology. She synthesized ligands for a variety of cell-surface receptors and studied their biological properties in cell-based systems, with the aim to selectively target specific cell populations. This resulted in exciting novel targeting entities for the mannose receptor, the mannose-6-phosphate receptor, and the follicle-stimulating hormone receptor. In collaboration with the medical biochemistry group of prof. Aerts (Amsterdam Medical Center), sortase-mediated ligations were explored to ligate these synthetic targeting moieties to proteins, and ensuring their intra-cellular delivery.
..to the USA and Switzerland
After obtaining her PhD with highest honors, Sascha moved to the Chen lab at Stanford School of Medicine, USA. There, she got fascinated by the Hedgehog signaling pathway and the organelle it requires, the primary cilium. She developed a genome-wide CRISPR-KO screening platform to identify genes involved in ciliary Hedgehog signaling.
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Since January 2019, Sascha has started her own lab at the University of Geneva (Switzerland) where she continues to work in the area of chemical biology to decipher and modulate ciliary signaling.