Dr. Valérie Gailus-Durner

Valérie is a proud key founding member of the German Mouse Clinic and is leading the GMC as Scientific Head since 2001. She coordinated the setting up of the phenotyping pipelines, project and quality management as well as the assembly of a highly motivated team of scientists, technicians and project managers. Under her guidance the GMC established a reputation for excellence in phenotyping mouse mutants of human diseases.

Valérie has a keen interest to understand gene function by taking a systemic view at the whole organism and to identify new disease genes. Main research interests are metabolic diseases, rare diseases and ageing. She is participating in and coordinating several national and international multi-partner consortia and large-scale projects.

Valérie studied biology and received her PhD in biochemistry in 1994 from the University of Constance, Germany. She spent several years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Waksman Institute, Rutgers University, USA., supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) as well as US fellowships. Her postdoctoral studies concentrated on genetics and transcriptional regulation of meiosis. In 1998, Valérie accepted a position at the GSF as senior scientist in bioinformatics at the Institute of Mammalian Genetics (Rudi Balling) where she worked on the analysis of complex regulatory transcriptional networks. In 2000 Valérie joined Martin Hrabé de Angelis’ new Institute of Experimental Genetics and together with her colleague Helmut Fuchs she established the first mouse clinic worldwide, the German Mouse Clinic. She served as executive board member of the first European Mouse Clinics (EUMODIC) and is member of the steering committee of the International Mouse Phenotyping Consortium (IMPC), a powerful network of mouse clinics for annotating the whole mammalian genome.

Valérie’s main ambition for the future is to make full use of the great potential of mouse models for human diseases and to make the enormous resource of phenotyping data more accessible for researchers and clinicians. New advanced methods will constantly improve pre-clinical models for studying treatments and genetic diseases, easing the translation to clinics.

mouse phenotypingrare diseasesageing

big data analysisnetworkingquality management