Annika Kuhn

Annika-Ricarda Kuhn was born in 1993 in Germany. She obtained her B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Biomedical Sciences at Maastricht University. During her bachelor, she worked as a student research assistant and performed an internship of four months in the orthopedic research department of RWTH Aachen University Hospital in Germany. During this time, she studied the role of micro-environmental stimuli on BMSC differentiation for musculoskeletal tissue engineering, as an evaluation of a novel scaffold culturing system. She completed her bachelor with a major in molecular life sciences and minors in diseased cells, neurosciences and toxicology in 2015. During her master, she performed her junior internship at the Bionanotechnology research group of the BIOMED institute at Hasselt University in Belgium. Here, during her five-month internship, she discovered her interested in cardiovascular research. She investigated microRNAs and target gene expression changes in a cell model of endothelial dysfunction. Annika first joined the group of Prof Blanche Schroen in 2016, when she started her senior internship. During this time, she focused on microRNAs as regulators of cardiac metabolism. She subsequently wrote her master thesis on this topic and completed her degree in 2017. She rejoined the group in August 2017 as a PhD student under supervision of Dr Marc van Bilsen and Prof Blanche Schroen, and will work on the ERA-CVD project LYMIT-DIS. Here she will focus on the impact of the metabolic syndrome on microvascular dysfunction and cardiac metabolism in the development of HFpEF.