Leonard Drees

PostDoc

leonard.drees@mpinat.mpg.de

Tel. +49 551 201-26116

I started as a Rink department postdoc in January 2020 and I am working on establishing methods for transgenesis in planarians. My goal is to enable the development of genetic tools in this rising model system and contribute to answering fundamental questions in animal regeneration and morphogenesis. After doing my Bsc in Biology, MSc in Microbiology & Biochemistry and also my PhD in Göttingen, it seems that this city wants to keep me captivated by offering such a great opportunity to work as a postdoc on planarians. While I know Göttingen extremely well, working with planarians was very new to me. For my PhD, I studied the role of membrane associated proteases during organ development in Drosophila in the lab of Reinhard Schuh at the MPI-BPC (since 2022 MPI-NAT). The mechanisms by which cells organize on the scale of organs, differentiate into distinct tissues and establish signaling pathways for tissue homeostasis have fascinated me ever since. In the future I will try my best to extend our knowledge of these mechanisms.