Marlies Oomen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular, Cell and Cancer Biology at UMass Chan Medical School.
She received her Ph.D. in 2021 from UMass Chan Medical School and Erasmus University Rotterdam (The Netherlands) in the lab Job Dekker and co-supervised by Bas van Steensel (Netherlands Cancer Institute). She then moved to Germany to complete her postdoctoral research in the lab of Maria-Elena Torres-Padilla at Helmholtz Munich (Germany). She returned to UMass Chan to start her own independent research group in the department of Molecular, Cell and Cancer Biology in Sept 2026
Her research program investigates the mechanisms of genome regulation of and by transposable elements (TEs) from an evolutionary perspective. She combines computational approaches to trace TE evolutionary trajectories across mammalian genomes with genomic and transcriptomic wet-lab experiments to test their regulatory capacity.
Marlies was one of the Development Pathway-to-Indepence fellows in 2025. Read more about her in this interview.