Taco Kooij PhD

Taco Kooij assistant professor

Taco Kooij is a molecular/cellular parasitologist and experimental geneticist with a broad interest in the biology of apicomplexan parasites. His main expertise is with the murine malaria model parasite Plasmodium berghei and analyzing the entire complex malaria parasite life cycle. After studying chemistry at Utrecht University and the University of Strathclyde (Glasgow), he finished his PhD (cum laude) at the Leiden University Medical Centre on a comparative genome analysis of malaria parasites. The next 10 years, he studied a variety of molecular and cellular biological aspects of malaria parasites at the University of Oxford, the Heidelberg University School of Medicine (on an EMBO long-term fellowship), and finally the Max-Planck-Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin. In 2014, he was awarded an NWO-ALW Vidi grant, which facilitated his return to the Netherlands. In Nijmegen, he aims to unravel the functioning of the malaria parasite mitochondrion using experimental and computational approaches.

Personal prizes & awards national & international

• 2014: NWO-ALW Vidi.
• 2008: Merial Award for groundbreaking Parasitology research in Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.
• 2006: EMBO Long-Term Fellowship.
• 2006: NWO-ALW Rubicon Fellowship.
• 2006: Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship.
• 2006: PhD Cum Laude in Molecular Parasitology, Leiden University Medical Centre, Netherlands.
• 2003: Poster prize, Molecular Parasitology Meeting XIV, Woods Hole, USA.