All ReVAMP Scientists

Ana is a post-doctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Luisa Iruela-Arispe at the Feinberg School of Medicine - Northwestern University (Chicago). She is particularly interested in the dysregulation of the RAS-MAPK signaling pathway and its role in the formation of vascular anomalies. Her research focuses on understanding the molecular mechanisms induced by mutations in the RASA1 gene in endothelial cells and how they result in the emergence of vascular malformations in the context of flow. As a graduate student at the University of Valencia (Spain), Ana's PhD work focused on the role of circulating microRNAs in acute myocardial infarction and endothelial cell function. She was also involved in the effects of estrogen in the regulation of endothelial-derived mediators and age-associated vascular dysfunction.

Annmarie Dominguez graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2018 with a BS in Chemistry. Shortly thereafter, she completed a two-year rotational program at a biotechnology company that specialized in developing therapeutics for patients with life-threatening illnesses. Annmarie formally joined the Arispe lab in the summer of 2021, shortly after completing a rotation with the group. At the time, she worked alongside Jocelyn Salvador to examine the effects of chromatin distribution in the mouse aortae, within regions experiencing different types of blood flow. She is now spearheading her own thesis project uncovering the key molecular interactions within the Notch-1 signaling pathway that drive the polarization of aortic endothelial cells in the presence of physiological laminar flow.

Chaker Aloui received a Bachelor's degree in Medical Biotechnologies from the University of Monastir, Tunisia in 2010 and a PhD from the University of Saint-Etienne in France. He currently serves as a Computational Genomics Scientist at INSERM in the GenMedStroke team headed by Professor Elisabeth Tournier-Lasserve. His research focuses on the identification of novel genes and pathways involved in cerebrovascular diseases, mainly in cerebral small vessel diseases (CSVDs) and moyamoya angiopathies. Chaker is combining various pan-genomic approaches with statistical methods on big-data issued from high throughput sequencing. His areas of expertise include medical genetics, rare disease, burden tests, exome and genome sequencing, RNA-seq, and bioinformatics.

Publications:

https://pubmed-ncbi-nlm-nih-gov.proxy.insermbiblio.inist.fr/?term=aloui+c
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Chaker-Aloui-2

Claudia Rödel started her scientific career studying the mechanisms of body axis formation in Drosophila melanogaster and graduated at the Georg-August University of Göttingen in 2011. Shortly after, she started a post-doctoral fellowship in the lab of Dr. Dimitris Beis at the BRFAA in Athens Greece, who introduced her to the fascinating world of the zebrafish. With Dimitris, Claudia started a project about the influence of blood flow on the endothelial cell behavior using pharmacological manipulations and transcriptomic analyses. She realized that the zebrafish model was an immensely powerful tool to understand vascular health and disease, because it incorporates the complexity of a complete and fully functional cardiovascular system, while being a simpler vascular tree. Furthermore, the zebrafish is extremely amenable to manipulation and live imaging techniques, which allows us to simply observe endothelial cells, especially when they misbehave!

In 2015, she joined Salim Seyfried's lab as a postdoctoral fellow to further pursue her research on endothelial cell biology and started to work on a rare neurovascular disease, cerebral cavernous malformations (CCM). What fascinates her most in this disease are the triggers that are not of genetic origin, but stem from other cues such as blood flow, flow pattern and other biophysical factors.

Danielle graduated from the University of Pennsylvania '17 with a BA in English and Biology. She carried out her thesis project at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, where she studied intestinal malabsorptive diseases using an organoid model. Danielle joined the Medical Scientist Training Program at Northwestern in 2019 and became a member of the Arispe Lab in 2021. Her current research interests include mechanisms that underlie vascular development and regeneration that can be potentially harnessed for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes.

Dinara Sharipova began her scientific career at Novosibirsk State University in Russia, where she earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in cell biology and genetics in 2019. During her studies, she investigated the mechanisms of neurodegenerative disorders, developing patient-specific iPSC-based cell models for Huntington’s and Parkinson’s diseases. While her primary interest was in biomedical research, she also developed a strong interest in developmental biology.

To pursue this interest and explore new model organisms and methods, Dinara completed an internship at the Max Planck Institute of Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, working in the lab of Prof. Dr. Nadine Vastenhouw. There, she studied zebrafish transcription factors, sparking her fascination with zebrafish as a model organism.

Following her master's degree, she expanded her research scope to cancer biology by interning at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, USA, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Lori Rink. Her work there focused on the mechanisms of drug resistance in gastrointestinal stromal tumors.

In 2021, Dinara joined Salim Seyfried’s lab at the University of Potsdam as a PhD student to pursue a research project that combines her interests in biomedicine and developmental biology. Her current research focuses on the role of nitric oxide signaling in zebrafish outflow tract development and elucidating the causes of bicuspid aortic valve disease using zebrafish as a model organism.

Dr. Gideon Pomeranz is a postdoctoral research fellow in Prof. David Longs group at the University College London Institute of Child Health. His PhD work focused on creating experimental models to study diabetic kidney disease. He did this by replicating the blood vessel organoid protocol and treating them with excess glucose and human diabetic serum. This work was also part of a collaboration between the Long and Penninger lab.

He also used state of the art bioinformatic tools to perform integrative analysis from multiple publicly available single cell RNA-seq datasets to identify a diabetic gene signature. For his postdoctoral work Gideon is focusing on trying to advance the blood vessel organoid by being able to perfuse the vessels using microinjection and xenotransplantation.

Haymar Wint completed her MD degree at the University of Medicine 2, Yangon, Myanmar in 2009, following which she worked as a medical officer at North Okkala General Hospital. After that, she got her master’s degree in medical Biochemistry in 2017. Subsequently, she was awarded the MEXT scholarship, enabling her to pursue her doctoral studies at Okayama University in Japan, under the guidance of Professor Kohji Takei and Ass. Prof. Tetsuya Takeda, primarily focusing on collective cell migration in cancer metastasis.

Upon the completion of her PhD, Haymar joined Phng lab in Riken, BDR as a postdoctoral researcher, where she continues to dedicate her efforts towards unraveling the complexities of endothelial cell dynamics. Her current research endeavors revolve around investigating the responses of endothelial cells to shear stress and stretch stimuli, operating at both cellular and subcellular levels.

Igor Kondrychyn graduated from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, followed by three-years postgraduate course in experimental oncology at Kavetsky Institute of Experimental Pathology, Oncology and Radiobiology in Ukraine.

In 2008 he received his PhD in Developmental Biology from the National University of Singapore for his work on the roof plate and central canal morphogenesis in the developing spinal cord of zebrafish in the lab of Prof. Vladimir Korzh at the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB), Singapore. He then continued to work as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the same lab, studying a role of zic3 transcription factor in the early embryonic development. In 2013 he moved to the National Center for Biological Sciences (NCBS) in Bangalore, India, where he studied the function of autism risk genes in the zebrafish neurodevelopment.

In May 2017 Igor Kondrychyn joined the Phng lab at RIKEN BDR, Japan as a Research Scientist. His current project is focused on investigating how hydrostatic pressure regulates endothelial cell shape and migration during angiogenesis.

Jocelyn Salvador began her PhD studies in the Molecular, Cellular & Integrative Physiology program at UCLA and is now a PhD student in the Driskill Graduate Program at Northwestern. She graduated from UC Irvine with a degree in biomedical engineering (BS) and then worked as a post-baccalaureate fellow in Dr. George E. Davis' lab where she focused on microtubule dynamics during endothelial morphogenesis using 3D matrices. Jocelyn is interested in EC mechanobiology, especially in the context of fluid shear stress, and in the Arispe lab she is able to combine her interests and expertise to study endothelial cytoskeletal dynamics under different flow conditions in vitro and in vivo, and effects of aging on endothelium.

Kasra Kamali began his scientific career in 2014 by studying cellular and molecular biology at the University of Mazandaran (Iran), where he published an article from his bachelor thesis titled 'Evidence of oxidative stress after continuous exposure to Wi-Fi radiation in a rat model.'

Following this, he began his master's degree in pathological microbiology at the same university in 2018, where he was working on a thesis entitled 'The role of Broccoli diet in the qurum sensing and expression of the pathogenic genes in Pseudomnas aeroginosa and effective genes in wound healing in mice.'

In 2020, he enrolled at Friedrich Schiller University Jena (Germany), and in 2022, he joined the Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology at the Hans Knöll Institute to pursue his master's degree in the biopilot plant group under the guidance of Prof. M. Rosenbaum and Dr. S. Hengoju. He defended his master's thesis, ‘Droplet-based microfluidic for high-throughput screening of serine protease,’ in 2024.

Kasra joined Salim Seyfried’s lab at the University of Potsdam as a PhD student in 2024 to look into the molecular processes that control growth and shape change, especially in vascular diseases like cerebral cavernous malformations (CCM) and hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia (HHT). In addition, he is looking into how the CCM and HHT signaling pathways interact with each other, which will help him see how these vascular abnormalities are controlled at the molecular level. This exploration of the HHT pathway after CCM opens windows for studying their intricate relationship and potentially uncovering novel therapeutic targets.

Katiannah Moise is a third-year grad student in the Arispe Lab. She used to study the protein components of the eggshell of the C. elegan embryo before joining the lab in 2019. A big worm nerd! As a member of the Arispe lab, her project revolves around investigating the molecular mechanism that drives cell shape dysfunction in endothelial cells in the context of inherited vascular diseases like that of Hereditary Hemorrhagic Telangiectasia (HHT). She is investigating how microtubule dynamics, specifically, post-translational modifications of microtubules are regulated by BMP signaling and laminar flow to maintain cell shape. Understanding what drives aberrant endothelial cell responses to flow when there are loss of function mutations in BMP will bridge the gap in understanding how arteries and veins fuse to form vessel malformations in HHT.

I am a bioinformatician in the laboratory of Prof. Vikkula. In 2017, I obtained a master’s degree in biomedical science. For my master’s thesis, I studied the activation of TGF-β1 by human T regulatory cells in the laboratory of Prof. Lucas. I then completed a four-month internship at Kobe University in Japan, where I investigated the nucleotide excision repair mechanism in xeroderma pigmentosum disease.

In 2018, I began my PhD in translational research in the laboratory of Prof. Van den Eynde. During my PhD, I studied and characterized the immune microenvironment of metastatic colorectal cancer in a clinical trial called AVETUXIRI (NCT03608046). My interest in bioinformatics grew during my thesis work, leading me to learn coding to perform RNA-seq analysis and spatial immunofluorescence staining analysis.