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 → | |
|---|---|
| November 13, 2026 (lecture hall U1.131) "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 U1.101) “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 U1.131) “Eco-evolutionary dynamics and engineering in the intestinal microbiome” Farewell Lecture Prof. Médéric Diard | |
| December 18, 2026 (lecture hall tba) Dr. Sam van Beljouw (group Yuping Li) “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. | |
| 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 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 23, 2027 (lecture hall tba) Guest speaker: Prof. Maxwell Heiman Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA Host: Susan Mango The goal of the Heiman lab is to understand how cells get their shapes and assemble into organs. Defects in this process lead to structural birth defects. | |
| 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. | |
| June 11, 2027 (lecture hall U1.131, tbc) 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. | |
| August 27, 2027 (lecture hall U1.131, tbc) tba Guest speaker: Dr. Ina Sonnen Hubrecht Institute, Utrecht, The Netherlands Host: Alex Schier The Sonnen group investigates how signalling pathway dynamics encode information to control development and homeostasis of multicellular systems. | |
| 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. | |
| November 19, 2027 (lecture hall U1.131, tbc) tba Guest speaker: Prof. Ivan Đikić Max Planck Institute of Biophysics, Frankfurt am Main, Germany Host: Anne Spang Đikić research is centered around two major cellular quality control pathways: the ubiquitin system and autophagy. As such they provide protection against various human diseases and are involved in almost all cellular signaling processes. |