About Colinda Scheele

Current function

Colinda Scheele is leading a research group since June 2020 in the VIB-KULeuven Center for Cancer Biology in Leuven. Together with her team of scientist (4 PhD students, 2 postdoctoral researchers and 1 Technician) they are using high-end microscopy, innovative 3D culture, and 4D tissue visualization techniques to film the "birth" of breast cancer. By visualizing the very first steps of breast cancer formation, they believe they will find novel ways of preventing cancer to form (instead of trying to cure it at a later stage). Her responsibilities are to formulate research projects, to attract research funding, to hire motivated scientists, to guide her team, to evaluate the experimental results, to write research papers, and to disseminate their results.

Biography

Colinda obtained her BSc Biomedical Sciences and MSc "Stem Cells and Developmental Biology" at the Utrecht University with highest honors (cum laude). Next, she worked at the Hubrecht Institute (Utrecht) and Netherlands Cancer Institute (Amsterdam) as a PhD student in the laboratory of Prof. Jacco van Rheenen, where she identified the stem cells of the breast by combining high end microscopy techniques with biophysical modelling. Her work was well received and she obtained several awards and prizes including the prestigious Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds PhD fellowship, the Bright Mind Award for excellent interdisciplinary research, the PhD of the year award (2017) from the Life Science Graduate School in Utrecht, the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Award (2020) from the Netherlands Cancer Institute. She completed her PhD in May 2020 with cum laude (top 3% of all PhD students at Dutch Universities), and started her own research laboratory directly after in June 2020 at VIB in Leuven.