Principal investigators
Cyril Moers, MD, PhD - project leader
Dr. Cyril Moers is transplant surgeon and tenure track assistant professor in the University Medical Center Groningen, The Netherlands. His recent research has covered a whole spectrum of clinical and pre-clinical studies in kidney transplantation, focusing on interventions before or during organ preservation to better conserve organ quality and to quantify the impact that donor characteristics have on post-transplant outcome. He was secretary of the scientific steering committee of the international Machine Preservation Trial and authored several key publications on this topic, two of which appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine. His line of research now focuses on pre-transplant organ resuscitation and evaluation, for which he has been awarded a Kolff junior postdoc grant, a ZonMw Klinische Fellows grant and an Innovation Grant from the Dutch Kidney Foundation. In 2019, he received an ERC Starting Grant for the current PRE-IMAGE project.
Henri Leuvenink, MSc, PhD
Professor Henri Leuvenink is a principal investigator at the Surgical Research Laboratory of the University Medical Center Groningen and program coordinator at the Groningen Institute for Transplantation, the Netherlands. He is also a visiting professor at the University of Oxford. His main research interests are organ preservation, machine perfusion and transplantation. Professor Leuvenink is a founding member of the European Consortium on Organ Preservation (COPE) and chair of the basic science committee of the European Society of Organ Transplantation, the machine perfusion implementation committee of the Dutch Transplantation Society and several other research and basic science committees. He has a wide experience in the organization and execution of multi-centre studies in transplantation (Machine Preservation Trial, NEJM 2009 and recently the COMPARE trial).
Ronald Borra, MD, PhD
Ronald Borra, MD, PhD works at the associated professor level at the University Medical Center Groningen, The Netherlands. He has previously worked at the Turku University Hospital in Finland and Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital. His research in the field of Radiology focuses on developing novel and clinically relevant imaging acquisition and post-processing methods for MRI and PET, with core expertise the field of MR perfusion imaging and hybrid PET/MRI approaches. He has published over 60 papers in peer-reviewed journals, is involved in the supervision of 8 PhD thesis works and lectures in the field of Medical Physics.
Anna Krarup Keller, MD, PhD
Dr. Anna Krarup Keller is a urologist working at the department of Urology, Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark as a member of the kidney team handling renal cancer and renal transplantations. For more than a decade, she has been working with experimental research within renal transplantation, focusing on organ preservation and postoperative graft function. She has received several national and international prizes for her research and has been awarded an honorary scholarship from the Danish Society of Transplantation.
Christoffer Laustsen, MSc, PhD
Associate professor Christoffer Laustsen is chair at the MR Research Centre, Department of Clinical Medicine at Aarhus University, Denmark. His main research interests are in the development and translation of advanced imaging methods – in particular, the so-called hyperpolarized carbon-13 MR method. He is head of an international leading group within hyperpolarized MR with special emphasis on translation from rodent to large animals, enabling the translation of new methods to human use. Christoffer Laustsen has wide experience in conducting pre-clinical and clinical research. He has published over 115 peer-reviewed publications. He is work package lead in the European COST action, PARENCHIMA, creating consensus on renal MRI. Laustsen has been awarded major funding from the Lundbeck Foundation, Innovation Fund Denmark, Danish Cancer society and Karen Elise Jensens fund.
Bente Jespersen, MD, PhD
Professor Bente Jespersen is a nephrologist and researcher who has been working at all three renal transplantation centres in Denmark. Since 2007, she has been Department Chair Professor of Renal Medicine, at Aarhus University Hospital, Denmark. She has a wide experience in conducting clinical research and has been involved in several multi-centre studies (e.g. CONTEXT-study, AJT 2016). Her previous and current research explores renal sodium handling and transplantation and in particular how to improve early graft function. In the latter research area she has a close collaboration with the Groningen Transplantation Centre for over 8 years.
Ulrike Dydak, PhD
Dr. Ulrike Dydak is Professor in the School of Health Sciences and the Director of the Purdue Life Science MRI Facility at Purdue University in the USA. She also holds an adjunct faculty appointment with the Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences at IU School of Medicine. Her mostly NIH-funded research interest lies in the development of novel magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and spectroscopy (MRS) techniques and their translation to clinical and life science studies – with a focus on manganese-induced neurotoxicity leading to parkinsonism, for which she has been awarded the Outstanding New Environmental Scientist (ONES) grant by NIEHS. Since 2007, Dr. Dydak has been PI of numerous extramural grants (4 NIH grants), and currently has four NIH R01 grants as PI or Co-I, next to four additional foundation and other grants. At Purdue she led the effort to obtain a NIH S10 large instrumentation grant, which led to bringing the Purdue Life Science MRI facility, a Purdue core facility, to campus in 2016. She has published over 75 papers, has graduated 12 PhD students, has been named a University Faculty Scholar at Purdue University, and has received several teaching and outstanding mentoring awards.