prof. dr. S.J.L. (Stephan) Bakker

Prof. Bakker (1963) received his MD in Leiden in 1988. Training for registration as an internist-nephrologist was from 1989 to 1995 in Eindhoven and Maastricht. From 1995 to 1999 he was staff member of the department of internal medicine at the Vrije Universiteit Medical Center in Amsterdam. Since 1999, he is staff member of the department of Internal Medicine of the University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG). In 2002, he defended his PhD thesis entitled “Pathophysiology of the Insulin Resistance Syndrome”, in which he proposed an important role for mitochondrial dysfunction and micronutrient deficiency in the deterioration of glucose homeostasis. In the University Medical Center Groningen, he started a research line based on the assumption that dietary balance is more important for maintaining optimal health in patiënts with organ dysfunction, for example patients with chronic kidney disease and diabetes, than for apparently healthy subjects of the general population. Rather than solely relying on questionnaires for health status and dietary questionnaries for performance of this research, he started with systematic application of biomarkers for assessing health status, nutritional status and nutritional intake. In this field, he is a prime advocate of the use of 24h urine collections for monitoring of nutritional intake and health, with recognition of the strong prognostic impact of 24h urinary creatinine excretion as a marker of muscle mass as one of his main achievements. He is program leader of the Groningen Institute for Organ Transplantation and head of the laboratory and biobank of the large epidemiological PREVEND cohort study in 8,592 subjects of the general population. He is involved in the large LifeLines epidemiological cohort study in 167,279 subjects of the general population and he is principal investigator of the TransplantLines Biobank and Cohort study in solid organ transplant recipients and healthy donors, which includes more than 2,500 participants. In February 2014 he was appointed as Professor of Internal Medicine, in particular “A Systems Medicine approach of the Metabolic Syndrome”. He has been author on more than 600 papers in international peer-reviewed journals and he has been supervisor of 37 succesfully defended PhD-theses. His h-index is 64 (Web of Science) and his articles have been cited more than 20,000 times.