Roland Kanaar

Prof. Roland Kanaar (1961) studied chemistry at the Leiden University in the Netherlands and performed post-doctoral work at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. In 1995 he joined the Department of Genetics and the Department of Radiation Oncology at Erasmus University Medical Center Rotterdam. In 2000 he was appointed Professor of Molecular Radiation Genetics. His current research addresses the mechanisms and biological relevance of the DNA damage response. The DNA damage response is essential to prevent chromosomal abnormalities, which in their turn may lead to hereditary diseases, aging, cancer, and cell decay. Roland is currently managing the large department of Molecular Genetics department of the Erasmus Medical Center Rotterdam. A salient feature of his work is the strong multi- and interdisciplinary approach, which contributed to making him a leader in the field. His work spans the experimental range from single molecule biophysics to animal models. Depending on the specific question at hand techniques from biophysics, structural biology, biochemistry, cell biology, molecular biology and animal genetics are applied in his laboratory. Roland is elected as member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation and Fellow of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is member of the editorial board of various international scientific journals, such as Molecular Cell and The EMBO Journal.