VISSERS Lisenka

Lisenka Vissers (1980), PhD, is a principal investigator at the Radboud university medical centre in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

She obtained her medical biology degree from the Radboud University Nijmegen in 2002, and obtained her PhD on molecular karyotyping by microarray-based comparative genomic hybridization in clinical care in 2007. In 2010, she was the first to apply trio-based whole exome sequencing to identify de novo mutations underlying sporadic intellectual disability, which created a paradigm shift in the field of medical genomics. From 2014 onwards, she was appointed head of Translational Genomics where she is responsible for clinical diagnostic innovation using genomic strategies.

She has been a member of teams which identified the genes underlying several human malformation syndromes, such as CHARGE syndrome and Koolen-de Vries syndrome, and amongst the first to use whole genome sequencing to identify major causes of severe intellectual disability. Her current interests are assessing clinical utility of novel diagnostic assays for routine clinical practice, identifying novel disease genes using genomics data, and improving interpretation of (de novo) non-coding mutations in disease phenotypes.