January 13, 2026
We had the honor to host
Dr. Katja Simon from Max Delbruck Center, who gave a talk on
“Mitophagy in myeloid cells in health & disease”
Dr. Emanuel Gonçalves from INESC-ID & IST, who gave a talk on
“Library Engineering and Synthetic Augmentation of CRISPR-Cas9 Screens for Cancer Drug Target Discovery”
Dr. Katja Simon Short Bio
Katja Simon trained as an Immunologist at the Deutsche Rheumaforschungszentrum, Berlin and during her PhD showed that TH1 cytokines are found in excess in human rheumatoid arthritis joints. For this, she was awarded the European League Against Rheumatism EULAR award. After postdocs at the Centre d’Immunologie Marseille Luminy and at the Weatherall Institute in Oxford, where she focused on cell death pathways in the immune system, she became a principal investigator. With her team, she pioneered the field of autophagy in the immune system. Her group discovered that autophagy, the main cellular bulk degradation pathway, promotes differentiation of healthy red blood cells and neutrophils, and maintains long-lived cells such as stem and memory T cells. She also showed that it prevents ageing of immune cells and can be used to reverse immune senescence. She has been a Wellcome investigator since 2015. In 2016 she moved to the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology Oxford and became a full professor. In 2022 she started a new group at the MDC in Berlin with funding from the Helmholtz Society for distinguished professors. She received the 2018 Ita Askonas prize for outstanding achievements as a female European group leader in Immunology and became a fellow of the UK Academy of Medical Sciences. In 2024 she was elected as a member of the Academiae Europeae.
Dr. Emanuel Gonçalves Short Bio
Emanuel is an Assistant Professor at IST and an integrated researcher at INESC-ID. Previously, was a postdoctoral fellow at the Wellcome Sanger Institute (supervised by Mathew Garnett) and holds a PhD in Bioinformatics (2017) from the University of Cambridge and the European Bioinformatics Institute – European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL-EBI) (supervised by Julio Saez-Rodriguez). He is a ELLIS (European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems) Scholar and a recent Fulbright Scholar visited the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.