Thijn Brummelkamp received his Msc in biology from the Free University in Amsterdam, in 1998. He did his graduate research at The Netherlands Cancer Institute in the group of René Bernards and received his PhD cum laude from Utrecht University in 2003. After his PhD he was appointed as group leader (Whitehead Fellow) at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, USA. In 2011 his laboratory moved to the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam and he became an Adjunct PI at Center for Molecular Medicine (CeMM) in Vienna.
For his studies he received the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Award (2003), The Annual NVBMB Award (2004, Dutch Association for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology), he was chosen as one of the world's top 35 Young Innovators by MIT's Technology Review Magazine (2005) and received the Kimmel Scholar Award (2006). He received an ERC starting grant from the European Research Council (2012), the 2012 Molecular Biosystems Early Career Award and he will receive the EMBO Gold Medal 2013.
2002 Described a system for expression of shRNA molecules (with Reuven Agami and Rene Bernards)
2003 Carried out the first RNAi screen in human cells (2003) and
Assigned a function to the cyldindromatosis tumor suppressor gene (with Sebastian Nijman, Annette Dirac and Rene Bernards)
2003 - 2006 Envisioned and developed shRNA barcode screens (with Rene Bernards and Roderick Beijersbergen, 2003, 2006)
2007 Identified the mammalian Hippo signaling pathway as a link between organ size and stem cell compartments (with Fernando Camargo)
2009 Developed an approach for haploid genetics in human cells (with Jan Carette)
