Vera de Wit was born on July 28th 1991 and grew up in Berg en Terblijt, The Netherlands. After graduating high school at the Porta Mosana College in Maastricht, she started Technical Health Engineering at Technical University Eindhoven and Medicine at Maastricht University. After obtaining her Bachelor’s degree in Medicine in 2013, she continued the Master’s program Medicine at Maastricht University. The internships in The Netherlands, Germany and Ecuador sparked her interest in internal medicine and cardiology. This also motivated her to perform the scientific internship at The Maastricht Study, where her research focused on the role of glucose metabolism status in the development of white matter hyperintensities (abnormalities) in the brain.
After obtaining the Medical Doctor degree, she was able to join the Diabetes and Metabolism Research Group at Maastricht University. As of September 2016, she started working as a PhD candidate on a project entitled ‘The role of cardiac mitochondrial function and lipid accumulation in the development of cardiac insulin resistance; etiology and treatment strategies’. This project aims to investigate the cardiac function in diabetes using imaging.
Her first study is almost finished and investigated the different methods to measure cardiac mitochondrial function in patients undergoing cardiac thoracic surgery. Currently, she is performing a study with a lipid-lowering drug to improve cardiac function and unravel metabolic pathways in the heart. In addition, in collaboration with the department of cardiology, she analyses a cohort to explore the role of endocrine function and adipokine production of epicardial adipose tissue in cardiovascular disease.