Bert B. A. de Vries

Bert B. A. de Vries is a Dutch clinical geneticist and principal investigator at Radboud University Medical Centre in Nijmegen. Born in 1964 and raised in the Hoeksewaard south of Rotterdam, he took his medical degree at Erasmus University Rotterdam in 1990, trained in clinical genetics there, and moved to Nijmegen in 2001. His team studies the clinical and molecular basis of intellectual disability and autism, and has helped identify the genes behind Schinzel-Giedion, Bohring-Opitz and Cantu syndromes. With David Koolen he described the 17q21.31 microdeletion in 2006 and its cause, the gene KANSL1, in 2012. The syndrome is named for both men, and he has said that this discovery was the first of his career and remains the one that is special to him.