Join SRUK Oxford in Kellogg College (60-62 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6PN) at 6pm on Thursday, 18th November. Our invited guests, Dr. Jordi Solana (Oxford Brookes University) and Dr. Patricia Alvarez Campos (Universidad Autonoma de Madrid), will delight us with a taste of their research on reproduction and regeneration, followed by a roundtable on the same topic. After that, SRUK Oxford members and friends will go to the Pub for a drink and/or dinner.
Dr. Jordi Solana studied Biology in the University of Barcelona, and then took two postdoctoral stages in the University of Nottingham and the Max Delbrück Centre for Molecular Medicine in Berlin. Currently, he is a Senior Lecturer at Oxford Brookes University. His main research interests are stem cells, their evolution and how they participate in regeneration and asexual reproduction. A few years ago, he developed a hypothesis to explain the similarities between pluripotent stem cells in several organisms across the animal tree of life. To study stem cell evolution, he has focused on planarians as they have a pluripotent stem cell population that allows them to regenerate when cut into pieces. He has introduced novel high-throughput quantitative methods in the planarian field, using a systems biology approach. He participated in the first studies that profiled the planarian stem cell transcriptome by RNA-seq and recently we applied single cell transcriptomics to planarians. With this, his research team wants to study the molecular, genetic and cellular bases of stem cell differentiation in different animal groups from a systems biology approach.
Dr. Patricia Alvarez Campos completed her BSc and PhD at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in 2016. Afterwards, she was hired as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institut Jacques Monod, CNRS in Paris to develop a project investigating the hormonal control of regeneration and reproduction in annelid worms. One year later, I was awarded a European postdoctoral fellowship to work on stem cells and single cell transcriptomics at Oxford Brookes University, using fresh water annelids as model organisms. Currently, I am an Assistant Professor at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and my research is focused on evolutionary patterns and speciation of marine worms, as well as on gene expression of reproductive and regenerative processes in several invertebrates.
