409 About the author A ABOUT THE AUTHOR Renée G.C. Maas was born on February 9th, 1994, and raised in Amersfoort. At 17, she moved to Groningen to study: Biological and Medical Laboratory Research at the Hanze Hogeschool. For her second internship, she moved back to her home town Amersfoort and generated the first human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes (hiPSC-CMs) within the University Medical Center Utrecht. After her graduation in 2015, she continued working as a technician for 6 months whereafter she started her master’s Cancer, Stem cells, and Developmental biology at the Utrecht University in 2016. During her master's, she received numerous travel grants (4) including the prestigious ‘Nederlandse Hartstichting’ travel scholarship to study the Phospholamban mutation in the lab of Prof. Mercola at Stanford cardiovascular institute, California for 9 months. In 2018 Renée started her Ph.D. research on hiPSC-CMs disease modeling in the UMC experimental cardiology lab and joined the Utrecht University Regenerative Medicine program. Prior and during her Ph.D., Renée successfully arranged numerous grants from the PLN foundation to cover her own salary for 2.5 years of her Ph.D. Renée has (co-)authored over 19 manuscripts including the journals cell stem cell and circulation. During her Ph.D, she was a daily supervisor of 13 bachelor and master students, participated as a university teacher in the Experimental Translational Medicine course, and was involved in a bachelor Regenerative Medicine lab training course. Renée was also a member of the Regenerative Medicine Ph.D. committee and the DCVA NLHI Translational Cardiovascular Research Meeting event committee. She has attended many meetings, presented during patient information days, participated in a national consortium HARVEY (NWO), and an international research consortia CurePLaN (Leducq). Additionally, she participated in many initiatives such as interviews, videos, and presentations to inform patients about the research effort we are performing to cure their disease. She recently was invited to be a reviewer for the journal; Reviews in Cardiovascular Medicine. Since 2023, Renée is now a scientific officer within the PLN foundation where she contributed to set up a laboratory and mobile bus for the collection of patient blood samples to perform more PLN patient related research. She was also selected to display her immunofluorescent microscopic images at an art exhibition (I Art my Science in 2021 and 2022). Last year, she was selected to be one of the 15 candidates in the Dutch Cardiovascular Alliance program to ‘steer my career’. This year, Renée is selected as one of the Talents 2024 by the ‘Financiel Dagblad’ - 50 Talents under 35 years of age. She successfully received over half a million euros to perform her personal research. With the last two travel scholarships grants from the ‘Vrienden van de Cardiologie’ and NWO-ZonMw-RUBICON she will spend 24 months in the Biodiscovery Institute within the Denning lab at the University of Nottingham, UK. Here, she will study; “Pathological traits and genetic modifiers in monogenic
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