IFE members

Contact: robert.schneider@helmholtz-munich.de

Contact: till.bartke@helmholtz-munich.de

Anne-Sophie obtained her Bachelor of Science in Pharmacology at McGill University in 2016. Her undergraduate thesis was conducted under the supervision of Dr. Moshe Szyf and involved developing approaches to study the interplay between DNA methylation and RNA polymerase in the context of cancer. She joined the research group of Dr. Sarah Kimmins for her Masters in September 2016, fast-tracked to the PhD program in May 2017, and obtained scholarships from the McGill Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, the Centre for Research in Reproduction and Development, and the Desjardins Foundation to support her research. Using animal models, epigenomic approaches and bioinformatics, her PhD work focused on delineating molecular mechanisms underlying the epigenetic inheritance of paternal metabolic disorders. Anne-Sophie joined the Schneider lab in 2022 and was awarded a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship for her research focusing on the role of histone modifications combinatorial occurrence on gene expression regulation.

Research interest: single-cell multi-omics and the epigenome-metabolome crosstalk.

Nationality: Canadian.

Sandra did her Bachelor's studies in Life Sciences at the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Universität in Hannover. After completing her Bachelor's degree, she spent six months in Singapore for an internship at Daniel Messerschmidt's lab at the IMBC. Sandra then moved to Freiburg for her Master's studies, focusing on genetics and developmental biology at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität. Following her Master's thesis in the lab of Claudio Mussolino at the Universitätsklinikum Freiburg, she started her Ph.D. with Robert Schneider at the Helmholtz Zentrum München. Sandra defended her Ph.D. thesis and continues her work in the Schneider lab as a postdoc, focusing on histone acylations.

Research Interests: Chromatin dynamics, Metaboloepigenetics.

Nationality: German.

Sarah obtained her Bachelor’s in Biological Sciences and her Master’s in Functional and Molecular Biology at the University of Campinas, studying the influence of a maternal fish-oil-rich diet on the cancer-cachectic offspring. She joined the lab in 2020 as a PhD student, focusing on how the links between metabolic enzymes and chromatin modifiers regulate histone and DNA modifications.

Research interest: Crosstalk between cellular metabolism and modifications on chromatin.

Nationality: Brazilian.

Huiwen obtained her Bachelor of Science in Biological Sciences from Jilin University in China and pursued her Master's degree at LMU in Munich, where she developed a profound interest in epigenetics. She worked on exploring the role of histone modifications on transcriptional memory during her master thesis. Huiwen is currently advancing her research as a PhD candidate in the Schneider Lab, where she explores the intricate relationships between transcriptomes and chromatin structure.

Nationality: Chinese.

Contact: daphne.cabianca@helmholtz-munich.de

Dr. Kurt Michael Schmoller studied biophysics at the TUM in Munich. For his PhD, he joined the group of Andreas Bausch at TUM to study the mechanics of in vitro reconstituted cytoskeletal networks. He then moved to Stanford University for a Postdoc with Jan Skotheim. During that time, he became interested in cell size, and used live-cell microscopy to investigate how budding yeast cells can measure and regulate their own size.

In 2017, Kurt started the research group 'Cell Size and Organelle Control' at Helmholtz Munich.

SchmollerLab external website

Publications external website

Francesco studied biomechanical engineering at Brescia University, Italy. For his PhD, he joined the group of Martin Hegner at Trinity College Dublin where he designed and built nanotechnological devices for clinical coagulation diagnostics and malaria vaccine candidates analysis. In the second part of his PhD he focussed on single-molecule force spectroscopy with optical tweezers to study the protein folding problem. He then moved to the group of Dr. Kurt Schmoller in 2019 where he develops open source software for bioimage analysis and studies mitochondria homeostasis in budding yeast. He led the development of  the software Cell-ACDC used by several labs for single-cell segmentation, tracking, annotation, and quantification of live-cell microscopy data.

Yagya has a bachelor’s degree in microbiology and biochemistry from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai, and a master’s in biology from LMU Munich. She joined the Schmoller Lab as a doctoral researcher in July 2020 and studies how cell size control adapts to changing nutrient conditions. Yagya combines molecular genetics and time-lapse live-cell microscopy to disentangle the roles of apparently redundant cell-size regulating proteins

Benedikt did his bachelor's and master's in mathematics and data science at TUM. Since 2020, he is doing his PhD in the labs of Pascal Falter-Braun and Kurt Schmoller developing a method for automatized cell cycle analysis in large-scale live cell imaging datasets. The high-throughput pipeline and resulting phenotypic datasets are used to understand cell size control and generally cell cycle regulation in genetically diverse, wild yeast strains.

Antonio completed his undergraduate studies in Physics at the University of Naples “Federico II", Italy, where he also received his PhD in Fundamental and Applied Physics. After that, he moved to the UK to work as a postdoc, first in the lab of Martin Howard at the John Innes Centre, then in the lab of John Marioni at the EMBL-EBI and the Welcome Trust Sanger Institute, in Cambridge. 

Nationality: Italian

Contact: antonio.scialdone@helmholtz-munich.de

Gabriele received his bachelor degree in Physics from the University of Torino, Italy in July 2017.  Then he obtained the master degree in Physics of Complex System from the same university in April 2019. During his master thesis he focused on cell competition in mouse embryo combining the analysis of single-cell RNA-seq data with mathematical modelling. He joined the lab in May 2019.

Nationality: Italian

After completing his Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and gaining working experience as an engineer, Marco obtained his Master's degree in practical computer science with a focus on machine learning. He then joined the IES as a PhD student in December 2020. He is working as a computational biologist in the Hoermanseder lab, with a special interest in gene regulatory networks.
 

Contact: martin.groth@helmholtz-munich.de