Fina A. S. Kurreeman | |
---|---|
Born | Mauritius |
Nationality | Mauritius, Netherlands |
Alma mater | |
Awards | UNESCO-L'oréal For Women in Science International Fellowships (2009) |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Rheumatology, Immunology, Medical Genetics |
Institutions | Leiden University Medical Center |
Fina Kurreeman is a Mauritian-Dutch medical geneticist and professor of rheumatology at the Leiden University Medical Center. [1] Kurreeman has authored 52 papers and received more than 6000 citations for her work in the genetic basis of Inflammatory disorders, in particular studying the role of non-coding RNA in disease pathologies. [2] She was awarded a 2011 Leiden University Medical Center Fellowship. [3]
Kureeman completed her postdoc between the Harvard Medical School Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Broad Institute, [4] in the laboratory of George Church. [2]
Kurreeman's recent work focuses on investigating the role of long non-coding RNAs in fibrosis and sclerosis. [5] [6]
In 2020, Kurreeman advocated for international support for Mauritius in the wake of the MV Wakashio oil spill, noting the biomedical potential of biodiversity and how such climate disasters can threaten future research. [2] She referenced in particular that many ongoing drug development projects depend on biomolecules recovered from environments such as those ecologies threatened by the oil spill, [7] stressing the importance of biobanking and sequencing projects.
Bonnie Lynn Bassler is an American molecular biologist; the Squibb Professor in Molecular Biology and chair of the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University; and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. She has researched cell-to-cell chemical communication in bacteria and discovered key insights into the mechanism by which bacteria communicate, known as quorum sensing. She has contributed to the idea that disruption of chemical signaling can be used as an antimicrobial therapy.
In genetics, a nonsense mutation is a point mutation in a sequence of DNA that results in a nonsense codon, or a premature stop codon in the transcribed mRNA, and leads to a truncated, incomplete, and possibly nonfunctional protein product. Nonsense mutation is not always harmful, the functional effect of a nonsense mutation depends on many aspects, such as the location of the stop codon within the coding DNA. For example, the effect of a nonsense mutation depends on the proximity of the nonsense mutation to the original stop codon, and the degree to which functional subdomains of the protein are affected. As nonsense mutations leads to premature termination of polypeptide chains; they are also called chain termination mutations.
Antisense therapy is a form of treatment that uses antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs) to target messenger RNA (mRNA). ASOs are capable of altering mRNA expression through a variety of mechanisms, including ribonuclease H mediated decay of the pre-mRNA, direct steric blockage, and exon content modulation through splicing site binding on pre-mRNA. Several ASOs have been approved in the United States, the European Union, and elsewhere.
The L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Awards, created in 1998, aim to improve the position of women in science by recognizing outstanding women researchers who have contributed to scientific progress. The awards are a result of a partnership between the French cosmetics company L'Oréal and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and carry a grant of $100,000 USD for each laureate. This award is also known as the L'Oréal-Helena Rubinstein Women in Science Awards.
Joan Elaine Argetsinger Steitz is Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University and Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She is known for her discoveries involving RNA, including ground-breaking insights into how ribosomes interact with messenger RNA by complementary base pairing and that introns are spliced by small nuclear ribonucleic proteins (snRNPs), which occur in eukaryotes. In September 2018, Steitz won the Lasker-Koshland Award for Special Achievement in Medical Science. The Lasker award is often referred to as the 'American Nobel' because 87 of the former recipients have gone on to win Nobel prizes.
Pascale Cossart is a French bacteriologist who is affiliated with the Pasteur Institute of Paris. She is the foremost authority on Listeria monocytogenes, a deadly and common food-borne pathogen responsible for encephalitis, meningitis, bacteremia, gastroenteritis, and other diseases.
Elaine V. Fuchs is an American cell biologist famous for her work on the biology and molecular mechanisms of mammalian skin and skin diseases, who helped lead the modernization of dermatology. Fuchs pioneered reverse genetics approaches, which assess protein function first and then assess its role in development and disease. In particular, Fuchs researches skin stem cells and their production of hair and skin. She is an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Rebecca C. Lancefield Professor of Mammalian Cell Biology and Development at The Rockefeller University.
Suzanne Cory is an Australian molecular biologist. She has worked on the genetics of the immune system and cancer and has lobbied her country to invest in science. She is married to fellow scientist Jerry Adams, also a WEHI scientist, whom she met while studying for her PhD at the University of Cambridge, England.
V. Narry Kim is a South Korean biochemist and microbiologist, best known for her work on microRNA biogenesis. Her pioneering studies have laid the groundwork for the biology of microRNA and contributed to the improvement of RNA interference technologies.
Grace Oladunni Taylor is a biochemist, formerly at University of Ibadan, Nigeria. She was the second woman to be inducted into the Nigerian Academy of Science and the first African awarded a L'Oréal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science.
Jeffrey Leiden is an American businessman who is the executive chairman of Vertex Pharmaceuticals, a biotechnology company based in Boston, Massachusetts. He was initially appointed to the board of directors of the company in 2009 and was CEO and president from February 2012 to March 2020.
Matire Louise Ngarongoa Harwood is a New Zealand clinical researcher and trainee general practitioner. She is an associate professor at the University of Auckland. Harwood was the 2017 New Zealand L'Oréal UNESCO For Women in Science Fellow. Her expertise is in Māori health, focussed on reducing health inequity by improving indigenous health and well-being.
Jannie G. Keyser-Borst is a Dutch cancer immunologist. She became Professor at Leiden University on 16 January 2019 At the Leiden University Medical Center she currently runs a research group investigating the regulation of the T cell response
Christine L. Mummery (1953) is an appointed professor of Developmental Biology at Leiden University and the head of the Department of Anatomy and Embryology at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands.
Ho Weang Kee is a Malaysian statistician whose research focuses on the application of statistical methods to genetic data analysis. She is an associate professor of statistics at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus in the Department of Applied Mathematics. In 2018, Ho received the L'Oréal-UNESCO International Rising Talent Award in recognition of her work toward developing a predictive model estimating the risk of breast cancer for Southeast Asian women.
Batsheva Kerem is an Israeli geneticist who was on the research team that identified and cloned the CFTR gene, which when mutated, is responsible for causing cystic fibrosis (CF). She later established the Israel National Center for CF Genetic Research. She discovered the most prevalent cystic fibrosis-causing mutations among the Israeli population, allowing for the establishment of nationwide genetic screening programs to identify carriers of these mutations and enabling prenatal diagnoses. She researches how some CF mutations prevent CFTR protein production by causing nonsense-mediated decay and abnormal mRNA splicing, and how therapies might be able to counteract those problems. She also studies the role of genetic instability in cancer. She is currently a professor at the Hebrew University.
Ioanna Tzoulaki is a professor of Chronic Disease Epidemiology at Imperial College London. She investigates prognostic risk factors and models for chronic diseases and meta-epidemiology. In 2019 she received a Greek L’ORÉAL-UNESCO Award for Women in Science.
Triin Vahisalu is an Estonian botanist. She studies the effects of stress on plants and discovered a gene that regulates stomata in harsh environments.
Mounira Hmani Aifa is a Tunisian geneticist, best known for her work in mapping the PRSS56 gene. She has been a recipient of the "Sur les traces de Marie Curie" award from UNESCO and the L'Oreal Foundation in 2012, and a fellowship from them in 2002.
Maria Yazdanbakhsh is a Dutch immunologist who is Professor of Cellular Immunology of Parasitic Infections and Head of the Department of Parasitology at the Leiden University Medical Center. She was elected Fellow of the European Molecular Biology Organization in 2023.