Marileen Dogterom
Technical University of Delft, Netherlands
Guest Speaker
Prof. dr. Marileen Dogterom is a University Professor at the TU Delft and Medical Delta Professor at Leiden University. Initially trained as a theoretical physicist, Marileen Dogterom moved abroad (Paris, Princeton, and Bell Labs) for graduate and postdoctoral training in the internationally rapidly developing field of cellular biophysics. In 1997, she came back to the Netherlands as an experimental group leader at the Institute AMOLF in Amsterdam, where she became member of the management team in 2003. She received a VICI grant by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) in 2007, and a prestigious ERC Synergy Grant for the project “MODELCELL” in 2013. In 2014 she moved to TU Delft to head the Bionanoscience Department (part of the Kavli Institute for Nanoscience). She was elected EMBO member in 2013, Academia Europaea member in 2015, and received the Dutch Physica Prize in 2015. In 2016 she was elected member, and in 2017 Board Member, of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). In 2018 she received the Spinoza award, and was named 2019 Fellow of the Biophysical Society. Since 2017, she leads the Dutch Consortium BaSyC (Building a Synthetic Cell) and is one of the initiators of the European Synthetic Cell Initiative. She is internationally renowned expert in experimental cell biophysics with a pioneering track record in biophysical research of the microtubule cytoskeleton. Over the years, her group has systematically worked on increasing functional biological complexity in reconstitution experiments, which paved the way for her current and future ambition to build synthetic cells.
Keynote presentation: Reconstituting cytoskeletal systems in artificial cells
Session "Signalling & Motility" | Tuesday, 1 Dec, 19:00 - 19:30 CET
Abstract: I will highlight recent advances (and challenges) in our efforts to reconstitute minimal, functional cytoskeletal systems in artificial confinement. An example is the reconstitution of basic mitotic spindles in microfluidic droplets. These efforts fit in a long-term ambition to build, in collaboration with others, a minimal synthetic cell from scratch.