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General Information
| Name | Janssen M. Kotah, PhD |
| Current affiliation | Postdoctoral researcher, University Medical Center Groningen, NL |
Education and training
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2011-2015 BSc in Psychology, summa cum laude
University of the Philippines Diliman, PH -
2015-2016 MSc Medical Neurosciences
Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin, DE - Year 1 of the Erasmus Mundus Neurasmus Joint Masters’ Program in Neuroscience, Track 4
- More information about the Charité's MedNeuro program
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2016-2017 MSc (Research) Neurosciences, cum laude
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, NL - Year 2 of the Erasmus Mundus Neurasmus Joint Masters’ Program in Neuroscience, Track 4
- More information about the VU's Neuroscience program
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2017-2022 PhD candidate
University of Amsterdam, NL - Supervisors: dr. Aniko Korosi, PhD, prof. dr. Paul J. Lucassen, PhD
- Thesis: Age-dependent impact of early-life stress on glia and synapses: Substrates for increased risk for Alzheimer’s disease
- Promotion date: February 8, 2023 (website in Dutch)
Work experience
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2022 - present Postdoctoral researcher
University Medical Center Groningen, NL - Supervisors: prof. dr. Bart J.L. Eggen, PhD, dr. Susanne M. Kooistra, PhD
- Project: Studying cell-cell interactions in multiple sclerosis
Scholarship and grants
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2015-2017 - Obtained a scholarship to participate in the Erasmus Mundus Neurasmus Joint Masters’ Program in Neuroscience
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2023 - Obtained a Young Talent grant from Stichting MS Research to carry out a six-week research exchange at the Chotima Böttcher lab at the Charité in Berlin, DE
- More information (in Dutch)
Research Interests
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Early-life stress in later-life health in mouse models
- Impact on aging in wildtype and APP/PS1 mice
- Impact on glial cells such as astrocytes and microglia
- Impact on the hippocampal synaptic proteome
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Neurodegenerative diseases from postmortem human samples
- Using spatial transcriptomics to study lesion progression in multiple sclerosis
Research skills
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Behavioral neuroscience
- Experiments with postnatal (postnatal days 9/21/28) and adult mice
- Standard behavioral tests (e.g., object reconition test, object location test, Morris water maze)
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Molecular neuroscience
- RNA isolation, qPCR
- Protein isolation, Western blot
- Isolating synaptosomes from frozen brain tissue
- Flow cytometry and fluorescence activated cell sorting
- Immunohistochemistry
- Immunofluorescence
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Imaging
- Light microscopy
- Epifluorescent microscopy
- Confocal microscopy
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Data analysis in R
- Data analysis and visualization with packages such as dplyr, tidyr, and ggplot2
- Write custom R functions and packages
- Analyze bulk RNA sequencing data (DeSeq2, EdgeR)
- Analyze single cell/nucleus RNA sequencing data (Seurat)
- Make shiny apps to visualize proteomics data
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Data analysis in Python
- Analyze single cell/nucleus RNA sequencing data (scanpy)
- Analyze spatial transcriptomics data (squidpy)
Languages
- English: Native speaker
- Tagalog: Native speaker
- Chinese (Hokkien): Native speaker
- Chinese (Mandarin): Fluent
- Dutch: Intermediate (B1)
- German: Beginner (A2)
- Japanese: Beginner (A2)