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 → | |
|---|---|
| September 25, 2026 (lecture hall tba) “Nuclear speckles capture splicing-stalled mRNPs through a retention-factor network” Kerstin Dörner (group Maria Hondele) “Transforming antibiotic discovery with human-relevant models and novel tools” Tamara Maric (group Urs Jenal) “Bridging Functional Prototype to Manufacturable Cartridge for Rapid Molecular Diagnostics at Point-of-Care” Arka Banerjee (group Mihaela Zavolan) | |
| October 9, 2026 (lecture hall U1.131, tbc) tba Guest speaker: Prof. Darren Gilmour University of Zurich Host: Alex Schier The Gilmour lab takes an integrative, multi-scale approach to study how dynamic cell behaviours, like motility, regulate the assembly and disassembly of organs. | |
| October 16, 2026 (lecture hall U1.131) “Programming Shape in Living Tissues” Guest speaker: Prof. Xavier Trepat Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain Host: David Brückner In his research, Trepat's aims to understand how physical forces and molecular control modules cooperate to drive biological function. | |
| October 23, 2026 (lecture hall tba) tba (group Fiona Doetsch) tba Dibya Saha (group Knut Drescher) | |
| October 30, 2026 (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. | |
| November 6, 2026 (lecture hall U1.101) tba 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) tba Sam van Beljouw (group Yuping Li) “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
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| 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. |