Education
- B.S. Molecular Biology, University of Vienna
- PhD Biology, University of Zurich Switzerland
- Postdoc, Broad Institute & MIT
- mj2794 (at) columbia (dot) edu
Bio
As an undergrad, I studied molecular biology at the University of Vienna, Austria, where I also did my Master thesis on protein folding. I joined the lab of Prof. Michael Hengartner at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, for my PhD studies. In close collaboration with the Aebersold lab at the ETH Zurich, we developed novel large scale approaches to identify microRNA targets genes in C. elegans. These years sparked my interest in gene expression regulation. After my PhD, I joined the group of Prof. Aviv Regev at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, USA. We developed new methods to integrate transcriptomics and proteomics data in order to gain new insight about how protein level changes are regulated during the immune response of dendritic cells and also established the first genome wide marker based CRISPR screen in primary cells. As I was a Marie Curie Fellow during my postdoc, I had the opportunity to join the lab of Prof. Erin Schuman at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany, to gain insight about translational control of gene expression in the nervous system for an additional year before starting my own research group at Columbia University in 2017. My overarching research goal is to understand the principles and mechanisms by which translational regulation controls the dynamics of gene expression and therefore affects processes like differentiation, stress response and pathogenesis.