Germany
I am a scientist who combines biochemistry, biophysics, and quantitative imaging to understand complex problems in cell biology. I am currently a group leader at EMBL in the Cell Biology and Biophysics unit studying physical mechanisms of chromatin organization.
Physical mechanisms of chromatin organization —Characterized how the pioneering transcription factor FoxA1 generates biomolecular condensates that bring distal regions of DNA together using high-resolution imaging (TIRF, spinning disk microscopy). —Develops assays to express and purify challenging proteins from bacterial and Sf9 cells using affinity-based methods, refolding, gel filtration chromatography, and ion exchange chromatography. —Produces antibodies and performs depletions of specific target molecules in cellular extracts. —Designs DNA constructs for protein purification as well as in vitro transcription. Performs mutagenesis of DNA constructs for mutant protein design. —Performs assays to label proteins and antibodies with synthetic dyes. —Pulls-down protein binding partners and prepares samples for mass spectrometry. —Establishes assays to label specific genomic loci using complexes of fluorescently labeled purified dCas9 and guide RNAs. —Develops custom-written scripts in MATLAB to quantitatively analyze high-resolution fluorescent imaging data. —Employs theory from statistical physics to quantitatively understand experiments, generating estimates of parameter values and force.
Predicting the onset of abnormal cardiac rhythms —Reconstituted monolayers of cardiac tissue from embryonic chick cells. —Macroscopic calcium imaging of propagating cardiac waves. —Developed a measure using theory to predict the onset of abnormal cardiac rhythms. —Numerical simulations of cardiac wave propagation. —Applied nonlinear dynamics to problems in gene networks, neuroscience, reaction-diffusion systems, and cardiac dynamics.