André G. Uitterlinden is an emeritus Professor of Complex Genetics and was with > 50 group members head of the Laboratory of Population Genomics and the genomics facility at the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam. Prof. Uitterlinden has a long standing interest in DNA analysis, both technically as well as applying this to human health related research. He has was mostly involved in identifying genetic factors for common traits and diseases, for which he early on initiated Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS) in the Netherlands and set up global consortia. In 2005 he initiated a service providing facility which is now, as the genomics Core Facility, one of Europe’s largest genomics facilities, providing services for DNA isolation, genotyping, sequencing, and data analysis, and is handling millions of samples for a global client portfolio. He is now focused on improving the position of Europe in human genomics projects and implementing genetic information in health care and prevention settings. He is PI of the strategic GOALL project within Erasmus MC (“Genotyping On ALL patients”). In 2020 he became member of the coordination team of the European 1+ million genomes initiative, and therein leads the “Genome of Europe” project to establish the first 100,000 reference genomes covering the population diversity across Europe. He has co-authored over 1500 papers (H-index 216)

Genome of Europe: a multinational reference and beyond