Prof. Hans Degens holds his MSc in Biology from the
Agricultural University Wageningen, The Netherlands, and his PhD in Exercise
Physiology from the Catholic University Nijmegen, The Netherlands. He has held
postdoctoral positions at the University of Liverpool (UK), the Karolinska
Institute in Stockholm (Sweden), the University of South Florida, Tampa (USA),
and the University of Maastricht (the Netherlands). He was an assistant
professor at Radboud University Nijmegen (the Netherlands) before his present employment
as a senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, where he is
currently a professor of muscle physiology. He is also a Visiting Professor at
Lithuanian Sports University (Kaunas, Lithuania), a Visiting Professor at the
University of Medicine and Pharmacy of Targu Mures (Romania), and has an
Honorary Doctorate from the Lithuanian Sports University. His main academic
interest is age-related changes in skeletal muscle morphology and function. His
team applied single-skin muscle fibers from human muscle biopsies and rodents.
The use of single skinned muscle fibres allows one to determine changes in
cross-bridge kinetics and fibre function without bias that can be introduced in
vivo by, e.g., changes in neural drive.
