Niels Harlaar wins the EHRA Young Investigator award!

Niels Harlaar, an extremely talented and dedicated PhD student in the lab, has won the Young Investigator Award (YIA): Basic and Translational Science during the annual EHRA (European Heart Rhythm Association) meeting.

Niels has won this award for his abstract entitled “Modelling of atrial fibrillation at physiologically relevant scales enabled by massive expansion of native human atrial cardiomyocytes”. He has put countless hours and drops of blood, sweat and tears (of joy now) into this project, with Twan De Vries in a defining role, to reveal something quite spectacular: a first-of-a-kind line of conditionally immortalized human atrial cardiomyocytes allowing, among others, next-level in vitro modelling of human atrial fibrillation in terms of size, robustness and electrophysiological parameters (incl. around 8 Hz activation frequency as observed clinically).

Congratulations, very much deserved!