About H. (Helena) Volarević
Introduction
Helena Volarević started as a PhD student on February 1st 2024, as a collaboration between the Internal Medicine Transplant Institute and Pharmacy departments. She is originally from Croatia, but has completed all of her university education in the Netherlands. Her background is in Biomedical Sciences and Clinical Research.
The aim of her PhD project is to optimize tacrolimus dosing after kidney transplantation. The project is comprised of two main parts. The first part is expanding a drug dosing software to include tacrolimus and obtaining the necessary legal approvals to register said software as a medical device. The second part is developing a calcineurin assay to measure downstream effects of tacrolimus.
Her favourite hobby is baking cookies, which she gladly shares with her colleagues and hopes to continue to do so.
Field(s) of expertise
- Clinical Research
- Therapeutic Drug Monitoring
Education and career
Helena completed a bachelor of science in biomedical sciences at Maastricht university in 2021. Her bachelor thesis focused on drug toxicity in cell cultures.
She then went on to get her master of sciences through the research master of clinical research at Erasmus University Rotterdam in 2023. She first joined the Erasmus MC hospital pharmacy for her master internship which resulted in her master thesis on the creation of a population pharmacokinetic model for intracellular tacrolimus in adult kidney transplant recipients.
