Anne finished her MSc degree in Biomedical Sciences at Radboud University Nijmegen (2006). During her studies, Anne has worked on ovarian specification during an internship with Peter Koopman (Institute for Molecular Bioscience, Brisbane) and identified microRNAs that control pancreas development with Ronald Plasterk (Hubrecht Institute, Utrecht, the Netherlands). Through this work, Anne had developed a lasting fascination with Developmental Biology and thus for her PhD training Anne decided to stay at the Hubrecht and joined the lab of Prof Jeroen Bakkers. She identified novel regulators that control extracellular matrix homeostasis in the developing zebrafish heart which is essential for cardiac valve formation. After completing her PhD, Anne relocated to the IMB in 2012 to work as a UQ postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Prof Ben Hogan. She initiated a project studying the mechanotransduction of endothelial cell-cell junctions in vivo, in collaboration with the lab of Prof. Alpha Yap.

Anne opened her own lab at the IMB in 2019. Her team uses both zebrafish and 3D cultured human vasculature to identify the cellular mechanisms that control blood vessel integrity, both during development and in diseases such as childhood brain cancer and familial vascular malformations.