Biotechnology and Biotech Industries Meet

Biography

Rob Krams is Chair and Professor of Molecular Bioengineering at Imperial College London. Prof Krams is trained as a medic and received his BSc (1987) and PhD (1990) degrees from the University of Amsterdam. His interest is in mechanobiology of blood vessels and he uses a combination of imaging, genomics and computational methods to elucidate genomic network information from endothelial cells. A new interest is in high throughput technologies. After a period of postdoctoral training in John Hopkins (Baltimore, USA), he moved to the world-renowned Thorax center (Rotterdam, NL) where he developed his skills in mechanobiology and imaging. From 2004-2008 he was a recipient of an established investigatorship of the Dutch Heart Foundation. He joined Imperial College in 2007.

Research Interest

Atherosclerosis, develops at predilection sites that are associated with changes in the blood velocity pattern. Endothelial cells are sensors for mechanical forces and mechanobiology has emerged as a new field of research, touching area’s as immunology, stem cell research, hearing, touching and pain. To that end we develop new technologies to study cells in well defined mechanical environments where we specifically focus upon mechanosensitive signalling pathways. The newly developed technologies consist of a platform where techniques like high throughput systems, microfluidics, quantitative imaging and synthetic biology smoothly interact.