Hello new staff #20

Maris has recently graduated from Stockholm University where he has a background in business administration and economics. At Labmed he will work as finance officer in the Labmed Professional Services finance team.

Mohamad completed his MSc in Molecular Biology of the Cell at the University of Milan. During his MSc, he conducted his internship at Amsterdam UMC, characterizing a mouse model of haploinsufficient osteogenesis imperfecta. He then interned at American University of Beirut, working on electrospun resorbable meshes for bone regeneration. He will investigate how TRAP/ACP5 regulates longitudinal bone growth and the immune system in a sex-specific manner, with a focus on the growth plate, osteoclast biology, and the interactions between immune and stem cell niches in bone.

Marcela has a background in tumor biology and have worked many years as a researcher at KI, in USA and in Canada, in the field of tumor microenvironment. She is originally from Argentina, where she got her PhD. From 2020 she has been involved in coordination/organization roles at KI, working for individual research groups, as well as for scientific networks (KIRI, NextGenNK). She is happy to continue at KI, where she has been working since 2009, and to join the Division of Pathology at LabMed. She will contribute to the organization of the lab at the Division of Pathology, do purchases, give introduction to the lab to new members risk assessments, do chemical inventory, be lab safety representant and be part of the work environment group. There are other ways she can contribute with in the future, which she is happy to discuss (for example support in grant applications).

Haeun is from South Korea and studied Bioscience Engineering at Ghent University, Belgium. She has lived in Belgium for four years, including during her studies and work. At Labmed she will study the role of recent thymic emigrants in the central nervous system under the guidance of Prof. Andri Lemarquis. Her research interests include thymus, immunology, and cancer immunotherapy.

Subhankar is a biologist from India with a PhD in cancer biology from CSIR-Indian Institute of Chemical Biology, Kolkata. His research has focused on chemotherapy resistance, DNA damage response and cancer stem cells, with experience in preclinical models. At Labmed he will contribute to the development and evaluation of antibody-oligonucleotide conjugates as a targeted delivery platform for oligonucleotide therapeutics. His research will involve assessing their cancer cell-targeting efficiency and therapeutic potential in suppressing tumor growth.

Prathibha is a PhD Biotechnology graduate from Centre for Stem Cell Research (CSCR), India, with expertise in hematopoietic stem cells (HSC) and gene therapy development. She previously worked on the pre-clinical development of gene editing approaches for curing hemoglobin disorders. She wishes to utilize her skills to further explore HSCs and thereby improve their translational potential. At the Sidinh Luc research group, she aims to investigate the mechanisms regulating blood stem cell function and to determine how normal stem cells transform into cancer stem cells and ultimately leukemia. The work integratesexperimental models, patient samples, high-throughput sequencing, omics approaches and bioinformatics analyses to understand promoters of leukemia development.

Anna is a Dutch biomedical scientist who completed her PhD at Radboudumc in the Netherlands, where she studied the immunological effects of physical exercise during cancer treatment. At Karolinska Institutet, she will continue in the field of Exercise Immunology, with a particular focus on elucidating the underlying mechanisms by which physical exercise regulates cytotoxic immune cell function.