Prof. Dr. Claudia Spits

Claudia Spits was born in Spain to a Dutch family that settled in a small beach town back in the sixties. She completed a Masters degree in Biology at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, and after obtaining a highly competitive grant, engaged in a PhD at the same university. During her spare time, she started a bachelor degree in computer science, which despite not having been completed provides her now with a good insight on algorithm design and programming. The slow progress of her PhD enticed her to wrap it up into a master thesis, and move to Brussels, to start a new PhD at the VUB, which she defended in 2006. She decided to stay in Brussels for a post-doc, instead of returning to Spain. The human embryonic stem cell laboratory was just kicking off at the VUB and she decided to join the group after obtaining a post-doctoral fellowship of the FWO-Vlaanderen.

Currently, she holds a faculty position and supervises a growing and very international team of researchers focussing on genome integrity and its consequences in human pluripotent cells. A recurrent theme in her work is the use of new technologies in applications they were not originally intended for, often pushing them to their physical and technical limits, and on rather unique samples.