Professorship awarded to Jan Philipp Junker
Dr. Jan Philipp Junker has been awarded a full tenured Professorship at the Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin in the Institute of Pathology. The permanent position will enable him to plan more long-term collaborative research in his focus area of tissue regeneration, he says. “I am looking forward to taking my research in new directions and to forming new collaborations.”
I am looking forward to taking my research in new directions and to forming new collaborations.
Junker joined the Max Delbrück Center in 2015 as a Junior Group Leader in Quantitative Developmental Biology, and has been an associate professor at Charité since 2022. For his research, he uses single-cell sequencing and spatial genomics techniques to better understand how tissues regrow in zebrafish, which have the remarkable ability to completely regenerate several organs. “We use these tools to learn about the origin of the regenerating cells and understand how they react to injury,” Junker explains. His research has helped inform our understanding of the basic developmental biology of zebrafish.
Nudging human tissue to regenerate
He is now planning to apply what he has learned to mammalian systems, which don’t regenerate to the same extent. He wants to genetically engineer human organoid models to see if it is possible to nudge human tissues, such as the heart and pancreas for example, to regenerate more robustly. “I also want to understand how cells sense mechanical forces, such as tissue stiffness or shear forces, and how these alterations affect interaction with neighboring cells,” he says. With the help of microscopy, he aims to visualize these changes in cell behavior and use gene sequencing to understand how, for example, changes in mechanical forces affect gene regulation.
He is also in discussions with researchers at Humboldt University about collaborating on building new models that take advantage of optogenetics – a technique that enables researchers to manipulate genes or proteins in cells by shining a light on them. “It would be very interesting to be able to activate or inactivate individual cells, or small groups of cells, in a tissue and observe how their behavior changes and the gene regulatory consequences,” Junker says.
Being affiliated with the Charité’s Institute of Pathology also means that he will have access to patient samples, helping him to apply his research into human models. “I'm excited to take full advantage of the cutting-edge technology at the Max Delbrück Center to push my research further,” he says. “With advanced microscopy, single-cell sequencing, spatial genomics, and optogenetics, we can explore human tissue regeneration in ways that weren’t possible before.”
Text: Gunjan Sinha
Further information
- Profile on Jan Philipp Junker
- How the zebrafish repairs a broken heart
- ERC consolidator grant for Jan Philipp Junker
