A recent profile can be found on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/silvietimmers/
Dr. Silvie Timmers was born in Neerpelt, Belgium, on July 12th 1984.
In 2002 she started with the bachelor Biomedical Sciences at the transnational University Limburg, on the campus located in Diepenbeek, Belgium. She graduated cum laude in 2005 and continued with the one-year MSc program Clinical and Molecular Sciences at the same university.
In July 2006 dr. Timmers started working as a PhD student at the department of Human Biology of Maastricht University on a project entitled “diet, insulin resistance and chronic inflammation”, which was financed by Top Institute Food and Nutrition (TIFN). This project included various molecular biology and physiological experiments in laboratory animals as well as human participants to unravel the role of dietary fat and fatty acid intermediates in relation to obesity and insulin resistance. Near the end of her PhD-period, dr. Timmers started to focus more on dietary components and natural compounds that can positively influence the cellular energy metabolism. She performed a human clinical intervention study with the natural compound “resveratrol” and was the first to show beneficial effects of resveratrol on mitochondrial function and metabolic health in humans. In June 2011 she was awarded a travel fellowship for young researchers from the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) to visit the lab of Prof. Auwerx in Lausanne (Switzerland), where she was able to show that resveratrol activated the AMPK-SIRT1-PGC1α-axis in muscle, a finding that was published as a cover story in the high impact journal Cell Metabolism. This publication was awarded the 2011 Publication Prize Nutrition and Health by TIFN.
In January 2012, she returned to the Maastricht University were she defended her PhD-thesis. Subsequently she received a talent fellowship from the Faculty of Health Medicine and Life Sciences of the Maastricht University to continue her research in this exciting field. This talent fellowship allowed her to gather pilot data for her prestigious VENI grant, “Boosting mitochondrial function in the prevention of type 2 diabetes: let food become the medicine”, which she received in July 2013 from the Dutch Scientific Organisation (NWO).