dr. J.T.M.L. (Judith) Paridaen

Judith Paridaen obtained her PhD degree at the Hubrecht Institute for Stem Cell Research and Developmental Biology and Utrecht University in 2009. She worked in the lab of Dana Zivkovic on genetics of zebrafish brain development. Here, she uncovered novel functions of several genes in different aspect of brain development, such as regional patterning and neuronal differentiation. In 2009, she joined the lab of Prof. Wieland Huttner at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany. Here, she studied the cell biology of neural stem cells in the mouse embryo on a long-term EMBO post-doctoral fellowship. In her post-doctoral research, she discovered that inheritance of subcellular structures such as centrioles and primary cilia plays a role in asymmetric stem cell division in the developing mouse brain.

In 2016, she joined the ERIBA as a Rosalind Franklin Fellow. Here, her lab studies the cell biological mechanisms that regulate stem cell division in developing and adult tissues. In 2017, she was awarded a NWO-Vidi grant. The lab is currently working on understanding how individual neural stem cells in the developing brain decide when to divide, and how they select daughter cell fates. We use the zebrafish as our main model system, and apply state-of-the-art techniques such as single-cell genomics, lineage tracing, genetic manipulations and live imaging in our research.