Maria Leptin Maria Leptin is full Professor at the Institute of Genetics, University of Cologne and Group Leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg. In 2010 she was appointed Director of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO). She received her PhD in 1983 and carried her postdoctoral work at the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, UK. From 1989-1994 she was Group leader at the Max Planck Institute in Tübingen. The Leptin group studies the mechanisms and forces that determine cell shape in Drosophila and uses zebrafish to analyse innate immune signalling. How did you first become interested in developmental biology? It was at the end of my PhD - which was in immunology - when I had to decide what to do for a postdoc. I used to go to seminars at the Basel Biozentrum , and had heard about germline transformation in Drosophila, from Alan Spradling , I think, and also about genome walking. The othe
Elisa Martí Elisa Marti is a Group leader in the Instituto de Biología Molecular de Barcelona since 2001. Following her PhD research at the Hammersmith Hospital (Royal Postgraduate Medical School, London University), she undertook postdoctoral training at Harvard University, USA. In 1998, she joined CSIC, as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Cajal Institute (Madrid). Her current research interest include the role of extracellular signals and the genetic networks that control cell numbers, cell identity and cell shape changes during the embryonic development of the neural tube. She has been elected as new EMBO Member in 2021. ¿Qué es para ti la biología del desarrollo? La construcción de un individuo, a partir una única célula, es una pregunta que ha fascinado a la humanidad durante toda nuestra historia como seres pensantes, y ha sido la fuerza motriz en mi investigación. Dentro de esta gran e inacabable pregunta, me he interesado por los mecanismos que regulan la construcció