Alumni

Benedikt Dürr

Internship student

Originally from Bavaria, Benedikt obtained his master’s degree in human biology from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München where he also completed his bachelor in biology.

In his master’s thesis in the lab of Liron Bar-Peled, MGH & Harvard Medical School, he characterised recently discovered protein interactions in the KEAP1/NRF2 pathway, which human cells use to maintain oxidative homeostasis. In previous projects Benedikt focused on mechanisms of the mammalian circadian clock (Maria Robles, LMU), recreation of cellular life (Petra Schwille, MPI Martinsried) and utilising the CRISPR effector protein Cas13a for medical diagnostics (iGEM Munich 2017).

 

Following this exploration of research topics and his biological background his current goal is to decipher underlying and shared principles of biological life forms as well as how they developed.

 

In our group, Benedikt was working on the reconstruction of projection neuron morphologies in D. sechellia and their comparison to D. melanogaster for 6 months end of 2022 and beginning of 2023. Now he is a PhD student at the Centre for Organismal Studies at Heidelberg University in the group of Gaspar Jekely.

Justine Pascual

Lab Manager

Justine received her master’s degree in Bioengineering from the University of Toulouse, France. After moving to Switzerland, she started working in the laboratory of Fisun Hamaratoglu at the CIG, UNIL on growth control and patterning in Drosophila. Then, she joined Etienne Meylan at the EPFL to work on the impact of microenvironment and metabolism on tumor development in lung cancer. She joined our team in May 2021 to explore gustatory circuit evolution in Drosophila species. After helping us to move the lab to the University of Fribourg, she returned to the CIG, UNIL in September 2024. 

 

Enrico Bertolini

Post-doctoral researcher

Enrico obtained his bachelor and master degree from the University of Padua. For his master thesis he moved to the University of Leicester where he studied the diapause of Drosophila melanogaster in the lab of Bambos Kyriacou. He then joined the group of Charlotte Förster at the University of Würzburg where he studied and characterized the circadian clock of selected non-model insect species. He obtained his PhD in 2018 and continued with a project on the anatomical and functional characterization of the dorsal clock neurons of D. melanogaster. Enrico was in the lab from January 2021 to December 2025 to work on the evolution of gustatory preference and feeding behaviours. He was supported by a DFG Walter Benjamin fellowship and is currently working on securing his next academic position.