Nienke Vollebregt

In her PhD, Nienke Vollebregt will have a focus on placental biology. This organ is a fascinating source of information in regards to developmental biology, tissue organisation, cell-cell and tissue-tissue communication, as well as being implicated in many pregnancy disorders. Unfortunately, up until recently the placenta has been understudied, in part due to lack of representative models because of large differences between species. In recent years, the placental organoid field has gained traction but there is still much to explore both fundamentally and translationally. In her research, Nienke will try to characterize the placenta in this 3D in vitro model by improving the physiological similarities and builiding on the complexity of the model. 

In early 2025, Nienke Vollebregt completed the track Cancer, Stem Cells and Developmental Biology from the Biomedical Sciences master offered at Universiteit Utrecht. During this program, her focus was on developmental biology from the beginning when she started her first internship at the Hubrecht Institute in the group of Matilde Galli to understand the emergence and purpose of polyploidy in development. This research was done in the model organism C. elegans. To further expand on human developmental biology, she chose to pursue a second internship in the group of Fredrik Lanner at Karolinska Institutet. Here, the research was focused on characterizing the cell-surface signature of the three lineages present in the human blastocyst.