Quantitative Spatial Cancer Biology -
Kokkaliaris lab
Our team
Our goal is to create an inclusive, collaborative & multicultural environment that supports researchers with passion for discovery and innovation.
Konstantinos D. Kokkaliaris, PhD
Group Leader
Sabrina Falco, MSc
PhD Student
Yihao Liu
PhD student
Shiba Barlian
Technical Assistant
Johanna Hofmann, MSc
PhD Student
Johanna Hofmann, MSc
PhD Student
Somaya Landolsi, MSc
PhD Student
Lea-Sophie Müller, MSc
PhD Student
Dr. Konstantinos D. Kokkaliaris
Group Leader
Dr Konstantinos Kokkaliaris studied Biology at the National & Kapodistrian University of Athens (Greece), before moving to the University of Edinburgh (UK) for his Master's by research in Life/Biomedical Sciences. He received his PhD from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (Germany) for thesis work at Helmholtz Center Munich under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Timm Schroeder and research visit at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York (USA, hosts: Moore/Lemischka group).
During his PhD work, he identified novel factors supporting long-term self-renewal of hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) ex vivo and patented his findings with Helmholtz Center Munich (Blood, 2016).
For his postdoctoral training, he moved to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich – Switzerland), where he co-developed novel approaches for 3D quantitative multiplexed tissue imaging (Nature Methods, 2018) and mapped the spatial organization of the bone marrow microenvironment (BMM) at the single-cell, protein level and tissue-wide scale (Nature Biotechnology, 2017). Funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP), Konstantinos joined the groups of Prof. David Scadden at the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard University and Center for Regenerative Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston (USA). There, he completed his work on the spatial distribution of HSCs in relation to multiple niche components simultaneously (Blood, 2020), contributed to the characterization of BMM's complexity at the transcriptome and protein level (Cell, 2018; Cell Stem Cell, 2018) and extended his studies into cancer biology.
Supported by the Mildred Scheel Career Center program, Konstantinos is currently an independent group leader at the University Hospital and Goethe University in Frankfurt (Germany).
Johanna Hofmann, MSc
PhD student
Johanna studied Biology at the Julius-Maximilians University in Würzburg and competed her thesis on the behavior of the parasite Trypanosoma brucei. Following her BSc studies, Johanna worked as a research assistant on Hematology/Oncology at the University Hospital & Goethe University Frankfurt, which further sparked her enthusiasm for research. For her Master’s studies, she focused on microbiology, infection and molecular tumor biology investigating the combinatorial effects of radiation and targeted molecular therapies against colorectal cancer.
Shiba Barlian
Technical Assistant
Shiba completed her Bachelor’s degree in Medical Science with distinction at Western Sydney University in Sydney, Australia. Due to her performance, she was included in Dean’s Merit list (top 10% of her class). Shiba also completed a Diploma of Laboratory Technology majoring in Pathology Testing at TAFE at New South Wales, Australia. Shiba has then moved to Germany and joined the group as a Medical Technical Assistant.
Sabrina Falco, MSc
PhD student
Sabrina completed her undergraduate studies in Biomolecular Engineering at the Technical University of Darmstadt. In her Bachelor's thesis, she investigated the dynamics of mutated p53 using single-cell time-lapse microscopy. Her interest in immuno-oncology led her to continue her studies on tumor biology, and immunology. During her Master's thesis at the Institute for Experimental Cancer Research of the Goethe University Frankfurt, Sabrina established a spheroid model for diffuse large B-cell lymphoma and investigated the influence of the 3D microenvironment on the efficacy of BH3 mimetics.
Somaya Landolsi, MSc
PhD student
Somaya obtained her Bachelor’s degree from Kuwait University, where she majored in Molecular Biology and minored in Biochemistry. Her bachelor’s thesis focused on the association of APOC2 gene variants with metabolic syndromes. Somaya joined the Friedrich-Schiller-University in Jena and acquired a Master’s degree in Molecular life sciences. Somaya completed her master’s thesis at the Institute of Human Genetics and Anthropology in the University Hopsital in Jena. focusing on the stemness characteristics and therapy resistance of human prostate cancer cells.
Alumni
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Anna Luise Weber (BSc student/Technician): now MSc student at Max Planck Institute of Aging, Cologne, Germany
Lea-Sophie Müller, MSc
PhD student
Lea studied Molecular Biotechnology at the University of Bielefeld. In her BSc thesis, she explored the effect of combinatorial chemical treatments in chromatin regulation and histone modifications of selected cell lines in vitro. Lea then completed her MSc degree in Molecular and Applied Biotechnology at the RWTH Aachen University with a specialization in medical biotechnology and tissue engineering. In her MSc thesis (DWI – Leibniz Institute for Interactive Materials), she studied the effect of various growth factor conditions in the chondrogenesis of mesenchymal stromal cells in 3D PEG-based hydrogels.
Yihao Liu, MSc
PhD student
Yihao graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Biomedical Engineering from Zhejiang University in China specializing in machine learning methods like long short-term memory (LSTM) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to detect cardiovascular events in electronic medical records. He then progressed to ETH Zürich, where he earned his MSc degree in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. There, he studied the tumor microenvironment based on single-cell RNA sequencing profiling and developed methods for image analysis of human brain organoids using spatial transcriptomics and graph theory (Treutlein lab). Yihao is co-supervised with Prof. Florian Buettner's lab.