June 17
We had the honor to host
Dr. Duarte Barral from NOVA Medical School, who gave a talk on
“Lysosome and melanosome exocytosis in cancer progression”
and Dr. Lief S. Ludwig from Max Delbruck Center, who gave a talk on
“Clonal dynamics and mitochondrial genetics through the lens of single-cell multi-omics”
Dr Duarte Barral Short Bio
Duarte C. Barral completed his BSc. (Hons.) degree in Microbiology and Genetics at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon and the PhD in Cell Biology at Imperial College London. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, until becoming Principal Investigator of the Membrane Traffic in Disease group at NOVA Medical School, NOVA University of Lisbon. He is currently a tenured Associate Professor with Habilitation at the same School. His research focuses on unravelling the regulation of membrane trafficking by Rab and Arf proteins in physiology and pathology. In particular, they investigate the molecular mechanisms of skin pigmentation and photoprotection, as well as the subversion of membrane trafficking in cancer cells, aiming to uncover new therapeutic strategies.
Dr Leif Ludwig Short Bio
Leif S. Ludwig graduated with a Master of Science (Diploma) and PhD (Dr. rer. nat.) in Biochemistry from the Freie Universität Berlin and MD from the Charite Universitätsmedizin Berlin. During his PhD he worked in the laboratory of Harvey Lodish at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, functionally investigating how human genetic variation affects human traits and phenotypes, in particular in the context of congenital blood disorders. During his postdoc in the laboratories of Aviv Regev and Vijay Sankaran at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard he established single-cell sequencing approaches leveraging natural mitochondrial sequence variation to enable the clonal tracing of human cells in a physiologic human context. In November 2020, he started his Emmy Noether research group at the Berlin Institute of Health at Charité and Berlin Institute of Medical Systems Biology at the MDC, where he and his team develop and apply single-cell technologies while investigating fundamental properties of mitochondrial genetics and stem cell dynamics in human hematopoiesis.