Laura de Rooij studied Biomedical Sciences at the University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands) and obtained her PhD at McMaster University in Hamilton (Canada). For her post-doctoral studies, she worked under the mentorship of Prof. Carmeliet in the lab of Angiogenesis and Vascular Metabolism at VIB-KU Leuven (Belgium). Here, she spearheaded numerous single-cell transcriptome atlases of endothelial cells, generated from a diverse range of tissues, preclinical models and clinical patient material. Her studies have shed new light on the degree of vessel subtype heterogeneity in different tissues, and led to the discovery of previously unknown vascular subtypes and functions, including endothelial cells with a lipid-processing phenotype in breast cancer, and endothelial cells with a putative pro-fibrotic function in COVID-19. Currently, her lab at CeMM (Vienna) focuses on deciphering the role of endothelial cell transcriptome heterogeneity in vascular aging.