Susanne Lens obtained her PhD in 1998 at the University of Amsterdam (René van Lier and Rien van Oers) for her studies on the role of CD27-CD70 interactions in normal and malignant B cell growth and differentiation, and on the signaling pathways leading to B-cell antigen receptor induced apoptosis. She then joined the lab of Jürg Tschopp, University of Lausanne, Switzerland to perform her postdoctoral studies on apoptosis inhibitors. In 2001 she changed research fields to gain expertise in cell cycle biology in the lab of René Medema, at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam, which resulted in her research line on the Chromosomal Passenger Complex and the regulation of chromosomal stability. She was appointed as Associate Professor within the department of Medical Oncology of the UMCU in 2006 and was awarded a Full Professorship on Genome Instability in 2013. Her primary research interests involve the molecular mechanisms that ensure error-free propagation of the genome during cell division, how defects in these mechanisms contribute to chromosomal instability in cancer, and how recurrent aneuploidy patterns in cancer arise and contribute to disease development.
