Leon J. De Windt PhD

Leon de Windt received a PhD in Cardiovascular Physiology and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute of Prof. Dr. Jeffery D. Molkentin in Cincinnati OH, USA. He became group leader at the Hubrecht Institute in Utrecht in 2002, and was appointed as Professor of Molecular Cardiovascular Biology at Maastricht University in 2010. In 2018 he became Chair of the inter-faculty Department of Molecular Biology at Maastricht University. His research aims to understand how programs of cellular differentiation and morphogenesis are affected in the processes leading to heart failure. Chronic heart failure is a progressive disorder of the heart muscle that affects all vital organs, ultimately resulting in loss in quality of life, frequent hospitalizations and a reduced life span. His ultimate goal is to dissect the genomic pathways of heart disease and transform this information to devise the next generation of pharmacological therapies for acquired heart disease in humans.