Tineke van de Weijer (MD, PhD) was born on the 31st of August 1984 in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. She studied Medicine at Maastricht University. During her studies, she followed an International Trajectory (ITG), including an extracurricular course on Tropical medicine, a minor on ‘Globalisation and Inequality’ and a course on ‘Health Services Management’ at the University of Birmingham (UK). During her clerkships, she joined the department of ‘Emergency Medicine’ at the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane Australia and did research on epigenetic gene-regulating pathways in drosophila at the ‘Université de Pierre et Marie Curie’ under the supervision of Dr. Frederique Perronet. Finally, she received her medical degree in 2008.
She received a ‘Kootstra Talent Fellowship’ in 2008 from the Maastricht University. In January 2009 she started as a PhD student at the Department of Human Biology of Maastricht University. She finalized her PhD thesis in 2013 which was entitled ‘Cardiomyopathy and muscle insulin resistance in type 2 diabetes mellitus; craving for sugars or dying for fat?” This PhD project focused on the relationships between intracellular lipid accumulation and mitochondrial function on skeletal muscle insulin resistance and cardiac function in type 2 diabetes.
In March 2013 she started with as a Resident at the Department of Radiology of the Maastricht University Medical Center and was granted a second “Kootstra Talent Fellowship” in 2014, which has allowed her to continue research in the field of diabetes and imaging next to her clinical Residency. Thereafter, she was also awarded a Junior Fellowship of the Dutch Diabetes Association in 2016. Her projects are now focused on validation of in vivo MR spectroscopy techniques for early diagnosis and follow-up of cardiac metabolic derangements in type 2 diabetes.
In July 2019 she finalized her Residency and now works as a nuclear medicine physician and Radiologist at the University Hospital of Maastricht. Besides her clinical work, she still is active within the DMRG research group as a scientist. This unique hybrid position allows to further build on the bridge between clinical and academic research in the field of magnetic resonance and nuclear imaging in metabolic disease.