Professor Boudewijn M Th Burgering

Boudewijn M.Th. Burgering is working since 2003 as a Professor in Signal Transduction at the Division of Biomedical Genetics at the University Medical Center Utrecht, the Netherlands. He studied Molecular Sciences at the University of Wageningen, and he received his PhD from the University of Leiden, where he studied the role of the small GTPase-RAS in the signaling of growth factors and hormones. Among others, this resulted in the identification of p21ras as a component of the insulin signalling pathway.

He continued his work on RAS and insulin signalling as a post-doctoral fellow in Utrecht at the Department of Physiological Chemistry. In 1995, a collaboration with Paul Coffer resulted in the discovery of the serine-threonine kinase PKB as a new target of insulin signalling.

Subsequently, he and other labs discovered the O-box family of Forkhead transcription factors (FOXO) as important substrates of PKB. Since then the role of PKB/FOXO in cell signalling has been the central theme in his research. At present, the paradigm is evolving that signalling through PKB/FOXO plays an important role in the aging process and that the incomplete functioning of this signaling provides an important contribution to the onset of age-related diseases such as cancer and diabetes.