Henk-Jan Boele, MD PhD, is a visiting researcher at PNI and an assistant professor at Erasmus University Medical Center. During his postdoctoral fellowship in the Wang Lab (2018-2021) he studied the effects of early-life cerebellar damage on autism developmental trajectories, using multi-photon imaging of dendritic spines in the neocortex. In addition, he performed the largest systematic literature review on neocortical synapse maturation across many mammalian species.

Henk-Jan’s aspiration is to make fundamental neuroscience available for society and patients. With a team of neuroscientists and software developers, who tackled the challenge of programming smartphones in an unconventional way to conduct neurobehavioral testing, he developed the new smartphone application BlinkLab. The goal of BlinkLab is to make well-established neurobehavioral tests easily accessible through the use of mobile devices and use them as digital biomarkers for neurodevelopmental delays, such as autism spectrum disorders.