Marjanka Schmidt

Marjanka Schmidt is an epidemiologist with expertise in genetics of breast cancer. She leads a research group at the Netherlands Cancer Institute and has a chair at Leiden University Medical Center. Her research line focuses on the effects of genetic variants on risk of breast cancer subtypes, prognosis and long-term outcome of breast cancer, combining the areas of epidemiological and molecular research. One major promise is that advances in the genetics area will lead to personalized medicine, where preventive and therapeutic interventions for complex diseases can be individually tailored to a person's genetic profile. Marjanka's group aims to contribute to the genome-based applications in health care practice by elucidating the role of germline variants in breast cancer risk and prognosis by molecular and genetic epidemiological studies, as well as addressing ethical, legal and societal aspects of genomics.