Peter Heutink, PhD

German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases

Peter was trained as a molecular biologist at the University of Amsterdam and completed his PhD at the department of Clinical Genetics of the Erasmus Medical Center Rotterdam. In 1994, Peter began his own research group to focus on neurodegenerative diseases such as frontotemporal dementia and Parkinson’s disease. In 2003, he moved to the VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam where he co-founded the Center for Neurogenomics and Cognitive Research and was appointed director of the Institute for Clinical and Experimental Neurosciences. Peter has been involved in positional cloning studies for Mendelian disorders and genome wide association and sequencing studies (GWAS) for a wide range of diseases. His work includes the development of statistical methods to investigate genetic variation in gene networks instead of single genes, ways to efficiently detect epistasis, and methods to better predict the causal risk variant in GWAS studies. Recently, his research has focused on genomic approaches to understand neurodegenerative disease as a member of the FANTOM project headed by the RIKEN OSC in Japan that aims to improve the functional annotation of the human genome.