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Biozentrum Discovery Seminars

Biozentrum Discovery (BZD) is a seminar series, which alternates between talks by renowned guest speakers and seminars given by graduate students and postdocs from the Biozentrum.

The seminars usually take place on Fridays at 11:15 - 12:15. 

Past lectures →
 
 
October 23, 2026 (lecture hall tba)

“Vascular Niche Regulation of Adult Neural Stem Cells” 
Dimitris Dimitrakopoulos (group Fiona Doetsch)

“Make it or Break it: How Biofilms Survive Antibiotics”
Dibya Saha (group Knut Drescher)
 
 
November 6, 2026 (lecture hall U1.101)
“Initiating transcription in embryos - A role for nuclear organization”

Guest speaker: Dr. Nadine Vastenhouw
University of Lausanne
Host: Susan Mango

Vastenhouw's team studies how the transcriptional machinery and chromatin template are brought together in time and space to robustly regulate transcription during development.
 
November 13, 2026 (lecture hall U1.131, tbc)
"The sex and geometry of organs"

Guest speaker: Dr. Irene Miguel-Aliaga 
Crick Institute, London, UK
Host: Claudia Keller Valsecchi

The Miguel-Aliaga lab seeks to understand how organs sense and react to their environment to maintain or change our physiology.
 
November 20, 2026 (lecture hall tba)

“One does not simply kill Brucella: bet hedging inside macrophages”
Maren Ketterer (group Christoph Dehio)

“The nuclear transport receptor Impβ is a regulator of actin polymerization”
Birthe Fahrenkrog (group Rod Lim)
 
 
December 4, 2026 (lecture hall U1.131, tbc)
tba

Guest speaker: Prof. Aleksandra Walczak 
Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France
Host: Anne Moor

Walczak's main interest lies in understanding the link between function, development and evolvability in living systems.
 
December 11, 2026 (lecture hall tba)
tba

Farewell Lecture Prof. Médéric Diard
 
 
December 18, 2026 (lecture hall tba)

tba
Maren Ketterer (group Christoph Dehio)

“Technology news: protein binders, imaging and proteomics”
groups Sebastian Hiller, Oliver Biehlmaier, Alex Schmidt
 

 

2027

 

 
January 8, 2027 (lecture hall tba)
tba

Guest speaker: Dr. Justin Crocker 
EMBL Heidelberg, Germany
Host: Claudia Keller Valsecchi

The Crocker group aims to understand the fundamental principles driving development, to allow for programming and predictive control of cell fates.
 
February 12, 2027 (lecture hall tba)
“Searching for Evolutionary Traces of Vertebrate Thalamo-Cortical Systems in the Zebrafish Brain”

Guest speaker: Prof. Emre Yaksi 
Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway
Host: Hannah Soyka

His lab's primary goal is to investigate how sensory information interacts with the internal dynamics of the forebrain, and how these processes are modulated by experience and internal states.
 
February 26, 2027 (lecture hall tba)

Guest speaker: Prof. Max Heiman
Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, Boston, USA
Host: Susan Mango

The Heiman lab aims to understand how cells come together to make an organism.
 
March 5, 2027 (lecture hall tba)

Guest speaker: Dr. Danijela Matic 
Institut Curie, Paris, France
Host: David Brückner

Matic is interested in how epithelial cells interact with their microenvironment during migration in gut homeostasis and cancer invasion. 
 
March 12, 2027 (lecture hall tba)

Guest speaker: Dr. Susana Coelho
Max Planck Institute for Biology, Tübingen, Germany
Host: Claudia Keller Valsecchi

The Coelho lab exploits brown algae to understand the origin, evolution and regulation of sexual systems diversity and multicellular development across eukaryotes.
 
April 9, 2027 (lecture hall tba)

Guest speaker: Prof. Benoît Ladoux
Max-Planck-Zentrum für Physik und Medizin, Erlangen, Germany
Host: David Brückner

His team studies the physical principles governing the self-organization of cellular and tissue systems as well as their adaptation to mechanical constraints of the environment. 
 
April 16, 2027 (lecture hall tba)

Guest speaker: Prof. Lisa Goodrich
Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA
Host: Peter Scheiffele

The Goodrich lab investigates circuit assembly, maintenance, and function in the auditory system both in the ear and the auditory brainstem.
 
April 30, 2027 (lecture hall U1.131, tbc)
tba

Guest speaker: Prof. Iñaki Ruiz
Institut de Biologia Evolutiva, CSIC-Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain
Host: Jean Pieters

Ruiz studies how pre-animal cell states, regulatory programs, and developmental mechanisms were reorganized into the first multicellular animals.
 
May 21, 2027 (tba)
tba

Guest speaker: Prof. Thomas Lecuit
College de France, Universite Aix-Marseille, France
Host: David Brückner

Lecuit's research focuses on morphogenesis, i.e. the origin of forms in living organisms, such as a neuron or an embryo.
 
May 28, 2027 (tba)
tba

Guest speaker: Dr. Yen-Ping Hsueh
Max Planck Institute for Biology, Tübingen, Germany
Host: Yuping Li

The Hsueh lab investigates the biology and evolution of predator–prey interactions between carnivorous fungi and nematodes.
 
October 1, 2027 (tba)
tba

Guest speaker: Prof. Benjamin Good
Stanford University, USA
Host: Ludovico Calabrese (Nimwegen lab)

Good is a theoretical biophysicist with a background in experimental evolution and population genetics. He is interested in the short-term evolutionary dynamics that emerge in rapidly evolving microbial populations like the gut microbiome.
 
October 29, 2027 (lecture hall U1.131, tbc)
tba

Guest speaker: Dr. Marta Zlatic
University of Cambridge, UK
Host: Alex Schier

The Zlatic lab aims to understand the relationship between the structure of the nervous system and its function and to discover the basic principles by which neural circuits implement fundamental computations.