School of Medicine
Showing 11-20 of 25 Results
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Richard Lewis
Professor of Molecular and Cellular Physiology
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsWe study molecular mechanisms of calcium signaling with a focus on store-operated CRAC channels and their essential roles in T cell development and function. Currently we aim to define the molecular mechanism for CRAC channel activation and the means by which calcium signal dynamics mediate specific activation of transcription factors and T-cell genes during development.
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Kif Liakath-Ali
Instructor, Molecular & Cellular Physiology
BioDr Liakath-Ali holds a PhD degree in molecular genetics from the University of Cambridge, UK. He carried out his doctoral and a brief post-doctoral research under the supervision of Professor Fiona Watt at Cambridge and King’s College London. While in Watt lab, he conducted a first, large-scale tissue-specific phenotype screen on hundreds of knockout mice and discovered many novel genes that are essential for mammalian skin function. He further elucidated the mechanistic roles of sphingolipid and a ribosome-rescue pathway in epidermal stem cell function. He has published many papers in the area of skin biology and won several awards, including, most recently a long-term fellowship from the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) and postdoctoral/principal investigator grant from the Larry L Hillblom Foundation.
Dr Liakath-Ali obtained his bachelor and master degree in Zoology from Jamal Mohamed College (Bharathidasan University), Trichy, India. He further specialized in human genetics and obtained an MPhil from the University of Madras, India. He went on to work at various capacities at the Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics, Hyderabad, India, Institute of Human Genetics, University of Göttingen, Germany and the Wellcome Sanger Institute, Cambridge, UK. Dr Liakath-Ali also holds a degree equivalent (Associateship of King’s College (AKC) in Philosophy, Ethics and Theology, awarded by King's College London, UK.
It is perhaps these combinations of diverse backgrounds and training that led Dr Liakath-Ali to develop an interest in fundamental questions in neuroscience. He is currently an EMBO & Hillblom Fellow, working under the mentorship of Professor Thomas Südhof at Stanford on genetic mechanisms involved in synapse formation and function. He is also an avid communicator of science, eLife Community Ambassador, STEM Ambassador and Ambassador for open science, research rigor and reproducibility. -
Martin J. Lohse
Visiting Professor, Molecular & Cellular Physiology
BioMartin Lohse studied medicine and philosophy at the universities of Göttingen (Germany), London (UK) and Paris (France). From 1978 to 1981 he did his MD thesis in the Department of Neurobiology at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysical Chemistry with Otto Creutzfeldt and Wolfgang Wuttke investigating the central nervous system effects of endogenous opiates. He was a postdoc in pharmacology with Ulrich Schwabe at the University of Heidelberg, and then with Robert J. Lefkowitz (HHMI, Duke University), where he later became an Assistant Professor. From Duke he moved to his first independent lab at the Gene Center in Munich/Martinsried, a new research center operated jointly by the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry and the University of Munich. In 1993, he became Chair of the Institute of Pharmacology and Toxicology at the University of Würzburg, and remained a professor at this university until his retirement in 2022. In Würzburg, he founded the Rudolf Virchow Center, the DFG Research Center for Experimental Biomedicine (2001-2016), and he became also the founding director of the University of Würzburg Graduate School (2003-2016).
From 2016 to 2019 he served as Chairman of the Max Delbrück Center in Berlin, a national research center for molecular medicine. In 2020, while keeping his lab in Berlin, he moved back to Bavaria to establish and lead the new start-up institute/incubator ISAR Bioscience in Munich/Planegg, that aims to use stem cell technologies to advance academic projects towards clinical applications and to foster the formation of start-up companies.
Martin Lohse has accepted many public and professional service duties. He was a member of the German National Ethics Council, Vice President for Research of the University of Würzburg, Vice President of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and President of the Society of German Natural Scientists and Physicians GDNÄ. He has been a member and chair of numerous scientific advisory boards across Europe. He holds honorary, senior and distinguished professorships at the Free University of Berlin, the University of Leipzig, and the Technical University of Munich TUM. At the Department for Molecular and Cellular Physiology of Stanford University he collaborates with the teams of Brian Kobilka and Ruth Hüttenhain to probe the local environment of receptors and its function and regulation. -
Daniel V. Madison
Professor of Molecular and Cellular Physiology
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsOur underlying forms of activity-dependent synaptic plasticity such as long-term potentiation and long-term depression, and in particular the function and plasticity of Parvalbumin-containing interneurons in neocortex. In the past few years, we have used a combinatorial approach to comparing physiological and anatomical plasticity-induced changes in synapses using electrode recording and Array Tomography in the same neurons.
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Merritt Maduke
Professor of Molecular and Cellular Physiology
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMolecular mechanisms of ion chnanels & transporters studied by integration of structural and electrophysiological methods.
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Lucy Erin O'Brien
Associate Professor of Molecular and Cellular Physiology
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMany adult organs tune their functional capacity to variable levels of physiologic demand. Adaptive organ resizing breaks the allometry of the body plan that was established during development, suggesting that it occurs through different mechanisms. Emerging evidence points to stem cells as key players in these mechanisms. We use the Drosophila midgut, a stem-cell based organ analogous to the vertebrate small intestine, as a simple model to uncover the rules that govern adaptive remodeling.
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Tino Pleiner
Assistant Professor of Molecular and Cellular Physiology
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsThe Pleiner lab combines mechanistic cell biology, structural biochemistry and protein engineering to dissect the pathways and molecular machines that mature human membrane proteins to a fully functional state. We also develop alpaca-derived and synthetic nanobodies as tools to modulate intracellular pathways that globally regulate protein homeostasis in health and disease.
