People

Director. Sara studied medicine at the University of Helsinki, Finland and absolved a MD/PhD program receiving her MD in 2001 and PhD in 2004.  After postdoctoral training with Reinhard Fässler at Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried, she was in 2010 appointed as a Max Planck Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for the Biology of Ageing in Cologne, Germany. In 2018 she returned to Helsinki and became Sigrid Juselius Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology at the Faculty of Medicine and Helsinki Institute of Life Science. In November 2021, Sara took up the post of director at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine in a part-time capacity and assumed it full-time in April 2022.

E-mail: sara.wickstrom@mpi-muenster.mpg.de

Group leader. Leah is a native Iowan and completed her BSc in Biology at Iowa State University. She obtained her PhD at the University of Iowa under the guidance of Dr. Martine Dunnwald, investigating keratinocyte differentiation and epidermal homeostasis. She then moved to the University of Helsinki for a postdoc in the Mikkola group to study hair follicle induction. Leah is interested in the signaling between stem cell niches to maintain skin homeostasis and developing technology to study and apply these principles. In September 2020 Leah started her own research group at the Stem Cells and Metabolism Research Program at the Medical Faculty, University of Helsinki.

In June/July, Leah will be joining the lab at the MPI.

Postdoc. Fabien was trained as a physicist and obtained a PhD in Biological Physics from Institut Curie, France in 2017. After his PhD Fabien worked for 2 years as a data scientist in a startup developing digital pathology monitoring tools. During this time he got interested in developing clinical decision support systems. He joined the Wickström lab in 2020 as a bioimage research engineer. His goal is to develop bioimage analysis pipelines to study cancer heterogeneity in colorectal and head and neck cancers.

In June/July, Fabien will be joining the lab at the MPI.

Postdoc – DFG Walter Benjamin Programm. Franziska is a clinician scientist. She obtained her specialization in Medical Microbiology, Virology and Infection Epidemiology and a second specialization in Dermatology and Venerology from the University Hospital of Cologne. Franziska investigates the role of sphingolipids in epidermal tissue homeostasis. She started on a collaborative research project of Prof. M Krönke (University of Cologne) and Prof. CM Niessen (University of Cologne) and then continued as a clinician scientist within the SFB 829 - Molecular Mechanisms Regulating Skin Homeostasis. In 2021 she joined the Wickström lab in Helsinki and now transitioned to the MPI for Molecular Biomedicine in Münster. Franziska elucidates the role of membrane sphingolipid compositions in orchestrating adult stem cell maintenance and fate. She aims at translating basic research findings into treatment concepts for lipid-associated skin barrier diseases. When not in the lab, Franziska loves traveling, being outdoors, preferably close to the sea side.

E-mail: franziska.peters@mpi-muenster.mpg.de

Postdoc. Clémentine received her MSc in Cancer and Cellular Biology at the University of Rennes, France, in 2015. She then completed her PhD in Cellular Biology in the laboratory of Dr. Philippe Chavrier at Institut Curie, Paris. She studied the role of the polarity protein aPKCiota on basally-oriented cell extrusion and early breast cancer cell dissemination. She joined the Wickström lab in 2020 where her postdoctoral work is focused on understanding mechanisms involved in epidermal stratification and how biomechanical signaling regulates cell fate and positioning during development. Outside the lab, Clementine likes cats, reading books and having fun with friends.

In June/July, Clémentine will be joining the lab at the MPI.