» Departments » NeCEN (Leiden, The Netherlands)

Bram Koster

Bram Koster has a long-term track record in method development and automation. After his PhD at Delft University in the Netherlands (Particle Optics, 1989), he was a post-doctoral fellow at UCSF in the group of David Agard on automated tomography and as senior researcher at the Max-Planck-Institute in Martinsried, Germany, in the group of Woflang Baumeister on cryo electron tomography. In 1998 he returned to the Netherlands and after working as an assistant professor at Utrecht University in the group of Arie Verkleij. He left for Leiden University in 2006, where he became full professor and head of the section Electron Microscopy. Within the LUMC he is a member of the Management team of the Bio Medical Imaging Profile (research focus area). He has various roles in national nanostructure related consortia and projects.

Ludovic Renault

After following a University education in Integrative Biology, Dr. Renault obtained a Master’s degree in bio-informatics and structural biology, and then a PhD in Neurosciences using X-ray crystallography as the main structural biology technique from Marseille University, France. He then joined Prof. Henning Stahlberg’s laboratory at UC Davis CA, USA as a post-doctoral researcher in high-resolution cryo-TEM where he performed single particle studies of DNA-binding proteins and obtained and imaged different 2D-crystals of membrane proteins. He then moved to Canada to join Prof. Howard Young at the University of Alberta to perform 2D- and 3D-crystallization of membrane proteins of interests as well as performing single particle studies of prion fibrils. In 2012 he joined CRUK (now part of The Crick) as a cryo-EM specialist to develop the cryo-EM single particle approach.

Dr. Ludovic Renault brings expertise in high resolution single particle data collection and image processing to NeCEN

Susanne Roodhuyzen

Susanne Roodhuyzen is the program manager of NeCEN.

iNEXT for you!

iNEXT can support researchers from all EU and associated countries, but also (in a more limited capacity) from international labs, to perform a variety of structural biology experiments with a translational research component, in the fields of X-ray crystallography, SAXS, NMR, EM, light imaging and Biophysics for Macromolecular Interactions. Support includes all access costs to all facilities, and support for travel and accommodation for the duration of experiments, where applicable. We particularly encourage applications from people with no or limited experience to the different techniques to look at our Extended Support and Structural Audit modalities, as well as expert researchers that will be more interested in our High-End Data collection modalities.

Europe-wide network

The iNEXT consortium involves 23 partners from 14 different European countries. Training and networking activities are carried out to attract new users and to disseminate scientific results across academia and industry.

EU funding

Funded from the Horizon 2020 programme of the European Union, iNEXT (H2020 Grant # 653706) is the first research infrastructure project that combines access to different structural biology technologies (SAXS, X-ray crystallography, NMR, EM, biophysical characterization).