Rik’s research group is primarily interested in understanding biology from a quantitative and absolute angle. Rik was trained as both an experimental and dry-lab biologist during his PhD in the lab of Michiel Vermeulen. Here, Rik used combined proteomic profiling with various genomics approaches to study gene regulation at a multi-omics scale in various developmental and cancer models.
After obtaining his PhD in November 2020 with the distinction cum laude, he moved to Cambridge in the UK to do a computational post-doc in the lab of Sarah Teichmann at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. Here, Rik used massive-scale single cell transcriptome and antibody-enabled proteome profiling to study the epithelial and immune reponses to SARS-CoV-2 infection.
In 2023, Rik was recruited as a junior group leader at the Netherlands Cancer Institute, where he will use (single cell) proteome and transcriptome profiling to characterize and model how cancer cells maintain their identity and interact with the immune system.