Danielle Posthuma - Biography#

Prof. dr. Danielle Posthuma is a statistical geneticist and head of the Department Complex Trait Genetics at the Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam and Amsterdam University Medical Center, Neuroscience Campus Amsterdam. She is a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences and the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities. In 2021 she received the Mensa Foundation Prize, which is awarded biennially for the best scientific discovery in the field of intelligence or creativity. She is the recipient of an Advanced grant from the European Research Council. She leads the Dutch BRAINSCAPES consortium which aims to bridge genetics and neuroscience and which was awarded 19.6M€ Euro in 2019 by the Dutch government.

Her work focuses on developing novel methods that aid in detecting genes for brain diseases, interpreting these findings in biological context and generating mechanistic hypotheses that can be tested in functional experiments. She has led several large scale genome-wide association studies for Alzheimer’s Disease, intelligence, insomnia and neuroticism, and is the lead author on innovative tools such as MAGMA (for gene-set analyses) and FUMA (for postGWAS annotation).

She has (co-)authored > 250 papers in scientific journals including Science, Nature, Nature Neuroscience and Nature Genetics.