prof.dr. A.D. van der Meer (Andries)

Dr. Andries D. van der Meer is an Adjunct Full Professor at the Faculty of Science and Technology of the University of Twente, The Netherlands. He heads an independent research team within the Applied Stem Cell Technologies department of the Bioengineering Technologies cluster, supervising seven Ph.D. candidates and a post-doc and coordinating multiple national and European research projects. The research of his team is focused on the development of organs-on-chips, which are stem cell-derived, microengineered models of the human body that are used to model diseases and discover new treatments. Some of the models that Van der Meer works on are the retina-on-chip, lung-on-chip and heart-on-chip, and his group has a specific focus on the realistic integration of blood vessels in organs-on-chips.
From 2013 to 2015, Dr. Van der Meer worked as a Senior Research Fellow at Harvard Medical School and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering of Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA. He actively developed organ-on-chip models of the blood-brain barrier and the lung alveolus for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Microphysiological Systems program and coordinated a collaborative project between the Wyss Institute organ-on-chip start-up company Emulate, Inc. and Janssen Pharmaceuticals. Before joining Harvard University, he was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Prof. Albert van den Berg’s BIOS/Lab-on-a-Chip group of the University of Twente, The Netherlands. During that time, he also served as an Assistant Coordinator for the project ‘Beyond Borders: Organs-on-Chips’ of the Dutch Royal Academy (KNAW). This project led to the founding of the Dutch Human Organ and Disease Model Technologies (hDMT) Organ-on-Chip consortium, for which Dr. Van der Meer is the representative of the University of Twente, as well as the vice-chair of its general assembly. Van der Meer is currently the vice-chair of the European Organ-on-Chip Society (EUROoCS) and the chair of the CEN CENELEC Focus Group for Standardization for Organ-on-Chip (FG OoC).
Dr. Van der Meer obtained his Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Twente, The Netherlands in 2010, and received his M.Sc. degree in Medical Biology from the University of Groningen, The Netherlands in 2005.

Organisations

• Faculty of Science and Technology (TNW), Applied Stem Cell Technology (AST)