In 2012, Verena joined the group of Prof. Robert Passier at the department of Anatomy and Embryology at the Leiden University Medical Center headed by Prof. Christine Mummery to carry out her Master assignment on the directed differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) to specific cardiac subtypes.

After graduating with cum laude qualification, she started her PhD program in Molecular Cardiovascular Developmental Biology in the group of Prof. Robert Passier. During her PhD, Verena was working on genome editing of hPSCs using CRISPR/Cas9 and the generation of different subtypes of cardiac cells and for use in drug screening and cardiac repair.

In 2017, Verena joined the Applied Stem Cell Technologies (AST) department of the University in Twente as a postdoc. Here she is working on the generation of advanced tissue models for safety pharmacology, disease modeling and personalized medicine utilizing hPSC-derived cardiac cells.

In April 2022, Verena started as an assistant professor at AST with a focus on hPSC differentiation, tissue engineering and disease models.