Dr. Mijke Buitinga (1985) studied Technical Medicine at the University of Twente. At the same university, she performed her PhD on the development of bioengineering approaches to treat type 1 Diabetes, which she successfully defended in 2015. After obtaining her PhD, she continued her career in science as a post-doctoral fellow at the RadboudUMC in Nijmegen where she used nuclear imaging techniques such as SPECT and PET to monitor non-invasively functional processes at a cellular or molecular level. She performed in vitro characterizations and in vivo studies using beta-cell targeting tracers in animal models and human subjects. In 2017, she went to Belgium to perform a second post-doctoral fellowship at KU Leuven where she studied beta-cell dysfunction, death pathways and the interaction between the beta-cell and the immune system.
In 2020, she was appointed as an assistant professor within the Diabetes and Metabolism Research Group at Maastricht University. Here, she will primarily focus on developing novel Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy techniques to study diabetes and other metabolic diseases. Dr. Buitinga has received several (inter)national, competitive grants, including the prestigious FWO postdoctoral fellowship, the JDRF postdoctoral fellowship, and the JDRF innovation grant. She received two awards for her PhD thesis from the “Dutch Society for Biomaterials and Tissue Engineering” and the “Dutch Society for Diabetes Research”. Dr. Buitinga has authored over 20 papers in leading endocrinology and imaging journals, including Diabetes, Diabetologia, and Journal of Nuclear Medicine.