I am a PhD student at the Amsterdam UMC under the supervision of Prof. dr. Karin Verweij and dr. Jorien Treur. I have done the Bachelor’s degree Liberal Arts & Sciences at Amsterdam University College (AUC) with a focus on biology, programming and academic writing. I completed my Master’s degree Bioinformatics & Biocomplexity at Utrecht University, where I researched methods for burden testing in ALS and quorum sensing in the human immune system. During my studies, I have also gained an interest in science education and communication. I fostered the former as the assistant programme leader of an interdisciplinary Master’s honours programme. To develop my science communication skills, I took a minor in science communication during my Master’s. During my PhD, I will study causal relationships between comorbid serious mental illness and cardiovascular diseases. Besides studying the potential genetic mechanisms that underlie these comorbidities, I also aim to analyse differences in the phenotypes of these comorbidities across various ethnic backgrounds. The ultimate goal of my PhD is to gain clinically informative insights into the causal relationships between serious mental illness and cardiovascular diseases.