Judith Staerk

Major achievements

• We demonstrated that human peripheral blood cells can be reprogrammed to induce pluripotent stem cells
• We showed that Optic Atrophy 1 gene controls human neuronal development by preventing aberrant nuclear DNA methylation
• We established a link between DNMT3B deficiency and mitochondrial biogenesis in embryonic stem cells

Questions

• Which genetic, epigenetic and signaling changes are needed for derivation of hematopoietic stem cells from iPSCs?
• What are the molecular causes for impaired blood cell formation in myelodysplasia?

Research focus

Our research focuses on deciphering molecular processes that govern human cell fate decisions, in particular hematopoietic specification. The overall goals are to functionally characterize epigenetic and genetic factors and signaling pathways during human hematopoietic development and to identify underlying molecular causes of disorders triggered by defects in lineage differentiation that we study in the physiologic setting. In addition, we are interested in defining how mitochondrial function influences stem cell renewal and differentiation. To achieve these goals, we are using human pluripotent stem cells, in vitro differentiation assays as well as primary patient samples and we combine these assays with genetic and genomic approaches.

The broad aims of our research are to:

• Identify key epigenetic events during human hematopoietic development.
• Identify underlying mechanisms of impaired blood cell differentiation.
• Identify how mitochondrial biogenesis affects hematopoietic and neural cell differentiation and how epigenetic dysregulation impacts mitochondrial biogenesis

Judith Staerk received her Diploma in Biology from the Philipps University of Marburg, Germany in 2001. She obtained her PhDin Biomedical Sciences under the supervision of Dr. Stefan Constantinescu at the UC Louvain, de Duve Institute and the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research focusing on cytokine receptor signaling during normal and malignant hematopoiesis in 2006. From 2007 - 2012 she was a postdoctoral fellow in the group of Dr. Rudolf Jaenisch at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, MIT, Cambridge, USA where she demonstrated that human peripheral blood cells can be reprogrammed to induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). In 2012, she started as a researcher and group leader at the Centre for Molecular Medicine Norway (NCMM), Nordic EMBL partnership, University of Oslo where she studied genetic and epigenetic events during early human hematopoietic and neural development.

Honors

• Research Council of Norway, FriMedBio Young Talent Research Grant
• Human Frontier Science Program long-term postdoctoral fellowship

Affiliations

• Group leader de Duve Institute, Brussels
• Investigator Ludwig Cancer Research Laboratories, Brussels