Jan Huisken and Caren Norden
Today, the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) announced the selection of 27 young researchers as EMBO Young Investigators. Two researchers from the MPI-CBG – Caren Norden and Jan Huisken – were selected to be a part of this lively research network. They join 342 current and past Young Investigators. The Young Investigator Program is designed for researchers under forty years of age who have established their first laboratories in the past four years.
Caren and Jan are honored for their past accomplishments and will be supported by the EMBO Young Investigators network for their future work. The researchers receive a range of benefits: financial support of 15,000 Euros per year for three years; laboratory management and non-scientific skills training as well as PhD courses; access to core facilities at EMBL and funding for themselves and their group members to attend conferences.
The research goal of Jan Huisken is to study developmental processes in living organisms by noninvasive biomedical imaging techniques. He developed the Selective plane illumination microscopy (SPIM), an imaging tool that offers unique possibilities for the systematic analysis of vertebrate development. SPIM makes it possible to understand embryonic development at a systematic level by imaging and quantitatively analyzing a large number of intact embryos.
How do individual cells contribute to shaping the complex design of the nervous system? Caren Norden is on a quest to find answers to this question! She and her group explore how single cell behavior contributes to the development of the zebrafish retina and they aim to link events at the single cell level to overall tissue rearrangements. Caren collaborates with theorists in order to understand how physical forces develop and act to build the intricate architecture of the brain.