Dr. Roderick Beijersbergen did his doctoral research in the lab of René Bernards at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam where he studied the control of the cell cycle by the retinoblastoma gene family. He received his Ph.D from the University of Utrecht in 1995. He then joined the group of Robert Weinberg at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, USA for his postdoctoral training. He was involved in the identification of the catalytic component of telomerase, hTERT, in human cells and studied the role and regulation of hTERT expression in the transformation of normal cells to tumor cells. In 1999 he returned to the Netherlands Cancer Institute as an AvL fellow where he continued to work on the regulation of the expression of hTERT.

Over the last years he has focused on the generation of tools to perform functional genetic screens with special emphasis on loss-of-function cell based screens. To facilitate loss of function genetic screens he has developed large collections of shRNA knockdown vectors, targeting large numbers of both human and mouse genes. The development of these technologies has opened up the possibility to perform large scale mammalian somatic genetics.