DrosTuga 2021 | Annual Portuguese Drosophila Meeting

Nicolas Gompel is currently the chair of Evolutionary Ecology at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, studies the genetic origin of trait diversification in wing formation and reproductive behaviours.
 

Nicolas obtained his PhD (2001) in Montpellier, France, in Developmental Biology. From 2001-2006 he was Post-doctoral fellow at University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA and the University of Cambridge, UK. Back in France he was co-PI, with Benjamin Prud'homme, at the Institute de Biologie du Développement de Marseille (CNRS)  studying the regulatory and behavioral evolution in flies. In 2013 Nicolas Gompel became Chair of Evolutionary Ecology at Faculty of Biology, LMU Munich, Germany, maintaining his focus on the genetic origin of trait diversification.

Outside the laboratory, he is an avid entomologist and science photographer, and participated in multiple outreach actions.

You can visit Nicola's personal lab webpage for more details.

Isabel M. Palacios is a Lecturer on the Nanchang Joint Programme at Queen Mary University of London and a visitor scientist at the University of Cambridge. She has extensive successful research experience with more than 20 grants and fellowships, and a long list of insightful peer-reviewed papers. Isabel has worked in various positions at the University of Cambridge for more than 20 years, after completing her PhD studies at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg.

Her ultimate scientific aim is to contribute to the understanding of diseases, and she believes that in order to achieve this goal we need to understand fundamental cell biophysical mechanisms underpinning health. She is focusing her research in the multidisciplinary field of cell and tissue biophysics. Her major interest is on the cell biophysical function of cytoskeletal forces and proteins during germline development, although she is exploring some of her findings in other cells (e.g., neurons) and organisms (e.g., mice), in a collaborative manner. 

Evidences of her strong interest in outreach are not only her publications related to science communication, but also her co-foundation of the DrosAfrica Trust. This charity's main mission is to help setting up a well-connected African research community that uses Drosophila as a model system for human diseases of interest in the area, capable of running high-quality projects of high impact on the biomedical field.

You can visit her personal lab website here: https://palacioslabqmul.squarespace.com