Dr. rer. nat. Lesly Calderon

Lesly Calderon studied Biochemistry at the University of Havana in Cuba and performed her master studies at the same institution and in collaboration with the University of São Paolo, Brazil. She was then accepted as a PhD student at the International Max Planck Research School of the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg and did her PhD in the laboratory of Prof. Thomas Boehm. During her PhD studies, by in vivo engineering thymic epithelial cells, she offered novel insights into the roles of specific factors from the thymic microenvironment for the homing of hematopoietic progenitors to the thymus, commitment to the T cell lineage, expansion, and acquisition of T cell identity.

In 2012, she joined the Lymphocyte Development group led by Prof. Mathias Merkenschlager, at the MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences, Imperial College London, where she investigated the role of the cohesin complex in transcriptional regulation in neurons. While fascinated with the molecular studies during her first postdoc, she delved her research by combining the newly gained molecular expertise with B cell Immunology. In 2018, she joined the laboratory of Prof. Meinrad Busslinger at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna and studied several molecular mechanisms by which the transcription factor Pax5 mediates B cell development. She next established an in vivo model system for pooled sgRNA CRISPR/Cas9 screens with the purpose of uncovering new regulators of B cell activation and differentiation into antibody-secreting cells.

Molecular ImmunologyB Cell ResponsesTranscriptional RegulationLymphocyte Development