Heleen van Beusekom studied Medical Biology at the Free University in Amsterdam and obtained her PhD at Experimental Cardiology, Erasmus MC, Rotterdam in 1993. She stayed and registered as experimental pathologist in 1996 and obtained a staff position in 1998 as head of the histology lab. She is currently associate professor in vascular healing and atherothrombosis, focusing on cardio- and cerebrovascular injury and repair in health and disease.
She manages biobanks of human thrombi retrieved for therapeutic purposes (stroke, acute MI) and employs large animal models of atherosclerosis, ischemic stroke, and acute MI to study vascular disease progression and regression. She actively pursues the reduction of experimental animal use by developing animal free models using micro- and macro-scale bioreactors to study vascular healing. She studies the genetics of cardiac- and vascular- myopathies (e.g. aneurysms) using local biobanks with cells, tissues and genetic data.
