Seyfried Group

Claudia Rödel started her scientific career studying the mechanisms of body axis formation in Drosophila melanogaster and graduated at the Georg-August University of Göttingen in 2011. Shortly after, she started a post-doctoral fellowship in the lab of Dr. Dimitris Beis at the BRFAA in Athens Greece, who introduced her to the fascinating world of the zebrafish. With Dimitris, Claudia started a project about the influence of blood flow on the endothelial cell behavior using pharmacological manipulations and transcriptomic analyses. She realized that the zebrafish model was an immensely powerful tool to understand vascular health and disease, because it incorporates the complexity of a complete and fully functional cardiovascular system, while being a simpler vascular tree. Furthermore, the zebrafish is extremely amenable to manipulation and live imaging techniques, which allows us to simply observe endothelial cells, especially when they misbehave!

In 2015, she joined Salim Seyfried's lab as a postdoctoral fellow to further pursue her research on endothelial cell biology and started to work on a rare neurovascular disease, cerebral cavernous malformations (CCM). What fascinates her most in this disease are the triggers that are not of genetic origin, but stem from other cues such as blood flow, flow pattern and other biophysical factors.

Van-Cuong Pham completed his Bachelor's in Hanoi (Vietnam), followed by Master's in Fukuoka (Japan). He has joined the Seyfried group at the University of Potsdam (Germany) since 2019 as a PhD candidate working under European Union’s Marie Curie project ‘V.A. Cure’, which aims to elucidate underlying mechanisms and find novel treatment for vascular anomalies diseases. As being always fascinated in using fish embryo to model human disease, he spends his time in the lab to generate transgenic and mutant fish that were later used to study the pathogenesis of vascular diseases, particularly cerebral cavernous malformation (CCM). His PhD project focuses on understanding chromatin remodeling in zebrafish CCM model by applying molecular biology and confocal imaging techniques.