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Maeike Zijlmans is a neurologist and principal investigator at the UMC Utrecht Brain Center and the Stichting Epilepsie Instellingen Nederland (SEIN). She completed her PhD with honors in 2011 under the supervision of Professors van Huffelen in Utrecht and Gotman in Montreal. Her thesis focused on developing new presurgical techniques for characterizing the focus of epilepsy, involving EEG-fMRI, magnetoencephalography (MEG), and specialized EEG electrodes with 3T MRI. Zijlmans spent a year at the Montreal Neurological Institute, where she researched high-frequency oscillations (HFOs) in depth EEG from presurgical epilepsy patients. She applied her findings at UMC Utrecht to record HFOs during corticography surgery, leading to a prospective randomized controlled trial known as 'the HFO trial', aimed at comparing the use of HFOs and spikes as electrical biomarkers of epileptic tissue in epilepsy surgery, with results expected to be published in 2022. Her research aims to improve the diagnosis and optimization of neurosurgical treatment for epilepsy, a lifelong brain disease affecting approximately 1% of the population.
PhD candidates at UMC Utrecht are generally considered employees. Admission requires first securing a position with a professor (promotor) within the Graduate School of Life Sciences.