As coordinator of the Master’s program Cancer, Stem Cells and Developmental Biology (CSDB) in the Graduate School of Life Sciences (GSLS), I am focused on guiding our students throughout their MSc education. In this role I form the connection between students, researchers (in the capacity of teachers and supervisors) and the GSLS policy team. I coordinate our program-specific introduction course ‘Introducing Cancer, Stem Cells & Developmental Biology’, the program-related course ‘Metabolic Pathways: From Cell to Disease’ and provide workshops that are part of the ‘Life Sciences Academy’. In addition, I am tutor for students in the BSc Biomedical Sciences and have other teaching tasks in the BSc Biomedical Sciences and BSc Medicine.

I am mostly involved in the BSc Biomedical Sciences but I also teach in courses in the Medicine BSc. Courses I coordinate are first year BMW course ‘Cellen’ and elective course ‘Hormonen en Homeostase’. Additionally, I coordinate and organize CMM education together with Koen Braat.

I am teaching, coordinating and developing courses in the bachelors Biomedical Sciences and Medicine. My main tasks are coordinating the first year course ‘Weefsels’ in the bachelor Biomedical Sciences and co-coordinating ‘Gezonde en Zieke Cellen 1’, a first year Medicine course. I am one of the core teachers in the Biomedical Sciences course ‘Genoom’ and I have additional teaching tasks in other bachelor courses.

I coordinate an elective in the BSc Biomedical Sciences curriculum: ‘Communiceren via het DNA lab’. In this course, I teach year 3 students about science communication, didactics, and, most importantly, how to teach the ‘Taal van de Tumor’ DNA-lab in secondary school classes. During this lesson, secondary school students try to figure out which mutations are present in the tumour DNA of a breast cancer patient by isolating DNA, preparing a PCR and running a gel electrophoresis experiment. In addition to my role as a teacher, I also coordinate outreach activities for the Diversity and Inclusion Platform of the UMC Utrecht.

CMM partcipates heavily in the academic education of medical and biomedical students. Fair and high quality assessment of these students is my main field of interest. I chair the Assessment Support panel (ASP) of the Graduate School of Life Sciences (GSLS) and am vice chair of the Assessment Support panel (ASP). I teach assessment to fellow educators and participate in monitoring the quality of assessment of the medical curriculum. As overall coordinator of 15 courses of the SUMMA curriculum, I aim to continuously improve the content and assessment of our courses in close collaboration with course examiners and SUMMA students. I contribute to the implementation of the education policy of the division DLAB in my role as eduction policymaker of the division, which I share with Erna van Wilsem.

To keep up with international STEM education qualifications Nalan Liv and Corlinda ten Brink of the Cell Microscopy Core (see facilities) together with Linda Hartkamp of the teaching staff have completely re-structured microscopy education within the UMCU. Now, both BMW Biomedical and GNK Medical students in UMCU effectively learn how light and electron microscopy techniques are used to study cells, evaluate disease processes and aid to diagnostic decision making through:

• Acquisition of new education microscopes to replace the old equipment dating back to the 70s

• Incorporation of virtual microscopy simulators and an online learning environment

• Introduction of virtual microscopy education

• Redesign of all practical microscopy sessions in the course ‘Cellen’ and ‘GZC-1’ to cover relevant microscopy and cell biology themes in a modernized education environment

• The preparation of a completely new and up-to-date sample set (>200 samples) of cells cultured on coverslips visualizing different organelles