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. After this, his research focus shifted from mitochondrial dysfunction towards the discovery and application of biomarkers for nutrition and health in cohort and intervention studies in patient groups (particularly transplantation and diabetes) and the general population. In this field, he is a prime advocate of the use of 24h urine collections for nutritional and health monitoring, 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 study in 8,500 subjects of the general population. 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 350 papers in international peer-reviewed journals.