Niels Geijsen appointed new co-editor-in-chief of StemJournal

Amsterdam, January 16, 2020 – StemJournal is pleased to announce the expansion of its editorial leadership with the appointment of Niels Geijsen, PhD, as new Co-Editor-in-Chief. Niels joins Chad Cowan, PhD, who has served as Editor-in-Chief since the journal launched at the beginning of 2019. Together they will guide the development of this open access, peer-reviewed journal in its mission to provide cutting-edge, high quality content to the global stem cell research community.

“I am honored to be working alongside Chad and an eminent international editorial board as StemJournal continues to evolve and grow. Our goals are to keep pace with developments in this burgeoning field and lower the barrier to publishing truly integrative biomedical research on stem cells. Our intention is to provide an environment uniquely positioned to publish important innovative research as well as foundational knowledge that is sharable and reusable across disciplines,” commented Niels.

Niels currently heads his research group at the Hubrecht Institute in Utrecht and is Professor of Regenerative Medicine at Utrecht University (The Netherlands). His group uses pluripotent stem cell-based 3D models of early embryogenesis to explore human development and genetic disease with a particular focus on skeletal muscle. In May 2020, the research group will move to Leiden University Medical Center when Niels’ assumes the position of Chair of the Department of Anatomy and Embryology.

Niels received his PhD in Molecular Biology at Utrecht University in 2000 and subsequently completed postdoctoral studies in 2004 in the lab of Dr. George Daley at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, Cambridge, MA. During his postdoc, Niels successfully pioneered a method for the in vitro generation of germ cells from embryonic stem cells. From 2004 to 2010, he was Assistant Professor at the Massachusetts General Hospital and principal faculty member of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute in Boston, MA. There, he explored the biology of pluripotent stem cells, which laid the foundation for later work modeling human genetic disorders.

In 2010, Niels returned to The Netherlands to the Hubrecht Institute of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences and became Professor of Regenerative Medicine at Utrecht University. In 2015, he cofounded NTrans Technologies based on a proprietary gene-editing platform developed in his lab. NTrans Technologies develops therapies for the treatment of genetic muscle disorders such as Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. In addition, he is co-founder and scientific advisor of Divvly, an open-science community that facilitates the sharing of research materials between scientists, promoting collaboration and reproducibility of research.

“Niels and I have collaborated in the past and I am delighted to be working with him now in this capacity,” added Chad Cowan, PhD, Harvard Stem Cell Institute, Assistant Professor of Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School. “His expertise, prominence in the field and enthusiasm will benefit the journal in many ways as we seek to provide a forum for studies that use stem cells to develop novel therapies and perhaps even cures for people suffering from devastating diseases.”

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