Mark Bakker

Understand and prevent intracranial aneurysms and subarachnoid haemorrhage using genetics as a tool. That is what drives Mark Bakker in his research. At the University Medical Center in Utrecht, the Netherlands, he performs family studies and common variant association studies to find genetic variants that contribute to the development and rupture of intracranial aneurysms. He performed the largest genome-wide association study of intracranial aneurysms (Bakker et al, 2020). This ESOC, Mark will present his latest project on genetic risk prediction of intracranial aneurysms.

Mark expects to defend his PhD thesis by the end of 2021 and is eager to continue investigating the genetics of stroke. He is further interested in the genetics of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Outside the office, Mark is a big sports fan, a triathlete, and enjoys learning about other fields of science.

Jingyi Liu

Jingyi Liu is a PhD candidate in the field of Neurology at Beijing Tiantan Hospital. She has participated in several national stroke clinical trials, including TRAIGE, CNSR-3, and CHANCE-2, and also in the ongoing international clinical trial CHARM.

Dearbhla Kelly

Dearbhla Kelly is an Irish Nephrologist who is an NIH StrokeNet Fellow at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. She is also a Senior Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health at the Global Brain Health Institute, Trinity College Dublin. She has recently completed a DPhil at the University of Oxford focused on the epidemiology of stroke in patients with chronic kidney disease, potential mechanisms including the role of hypertension, outcomes, and preventative and treatment strategies. She is also interested in cognitive disorders in patients with kidney disease, and the impact of blood pressure on brain health.

Laura van der Kamp

Direct clinical care, as well as research to improve clinical care, have my particular interest. I use my open, involved, and enthusiastic attitude in contact with colleagues and patients. I'm graduated as a medical doctor in September 2020 and I'm currently working as a PhD student in the field of unruptured intracranial aneurysms.

Alba Grayston

I finished my studies in Biomedical Sciences in 2016 at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB, Spain). In 2017 I finished a MSc in Translational Biomedical Research with the work “Endothelial secretome and trophic factors to promote angioneurogenesis in vitro as future neurorepair therapies in stroke” at the Vall d’Hebron Research Institute (VHIR, Barcelona - Spain).
I hold a pre-doctoral fellowship (2018-2022) at the Neurovascular research lab (VHIR, Barcelona - Spain), during which I have spent 4 months at the IRCCS San Raffaele Hospital (Milan - Italy), as a collaboration within the Euronanomed III project “New MAGnetic Biomaterials for Brain Repair and Imaging after Stroke (MAGBBRIS)”.
My current research mainly focuses on the synergic use of nanomaterials, cell-derived trophic factors, and endovascular approaches to promote neurorepair in pre-clinical stroke models.