Academic supervisor    Lab Homepage    Department of Physiology and Metabolism (PHYME)    Bernhard.Wehrle-Haller(at)unige.ch    Tel. +41(0) 22 379 52 71

Bernhard Wehrle-Haller is an associate professor in the Department of Cell Physiology and Metabolism at the University of Geneva . BWH was a member of the Bioimaging core facility steering commitee since its creation in 2001 and co-director with AD since 2012. BWH received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Basel, Switzerland in 1992 analyzing neurite growth and glial cell adhesion on the extracellular matrix protein tenascin under the supervision of Professor Matthias Chiquet. He then joined the labs of Professor James A. Weston at the University of Oregon, USA (93-97) and subsequently Professor Beat A. Imhof at the Pathology department of the University of Geneva, Switzerland, analyzing growth factor and integrin mediated melanocyte migration and adhesion. Since 1996 BWH employed fluorescent protein-based fusion proteins to study cell functions with quantitative live cell imaging. Notable contributions include the development of the first functional fusion proteins of green fluorescent protein with actin and integrin family adhesion receptors. Recent work at the Wehrle-Haller lab provided insight into mechanisms controling integrin-dependent cell-extracellular matrix attachment and subsequent intracellular signaling, leading to cell spreading and migration.

Member of the bureau Lab Homepage Department of Physiology and Metabolism (PHYME) Patrick.Meraldi(at)unige.ch Tel: +41(0) 22 379 55 12

Patrick Meraldi is an associate professor working in the field of cell biology, with an emphasis on cell division and cancer research. He is a member of the bureau of the Bioimaging Facility since 2013. Patrick Meraldi studied Biology at the ETH, before joining for his PhD studies the laboratory of Prof. Erich Nigg at the Department of Molecular Biology at the University of Geneva in 1996 to investigate the regulation of centrosomes during the cell cycle. After graduating in 1999 Patrick Meraldi followed Erich Nigg at the Max-Planck-Institute Martinsried, Germany, as a post-doctoral researcher. In 2002 he moved as an EMBO-post-doc to the laboratory of Prof. Peter Sorger at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge USA, to study the regulation of cell division.  In 2005 he started his own laboratory at the Institute of Biochemistry of the ETH Zurich, Switzerland, before obtaining in 2005 an SNFS assistant professorship. In 2012 Patrick Meraldi joined as an associate professor the Cellular Physiology Department of the Medical Faculty of the University of Geneva. He was awarded in 2005 a EURYI award, in 2009 an EMBO YIP award, and in 2011 the Walther Flemming Medal and Ernst Th. Jucker prize for cancer research. Recent work in the Meraldi laboratory investigates the fundamental mechanisms of cell division, the origin of erroneous cell divisions in cancer cells and possible means to exploit these erroneous cell divisions to target cancer cells. Their approach relies on high-resolution quantitative light microscopy and extensive image analysis combined with cell biology, and biochemistry.

Membre of the Bureau    Lab Homepage    Department of Microbiology and Molecular Medicine (MIMOL)    Mathieu.Brochet(at)unige.ch    Tel. +41(0) 22 379 50 21

Mathieu Brochet is an associate professor working in the field of infectious diseases, with a focus on the parasites causing malaria. He is a member of the bureau of the Bioimaging Facility since 2020. Mathieu obtained is PhD degree at the Institut Pasteur in 2007. During his PhD, he studied how bacterial pathogens evolve to adapt to their hosts. He was then an EMBO and Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge where he studied the biology underlying the transmission of malaria parasites to the mosquito. He was appointed as a senior INSERM investigator in 2014. In 2015 he was awarded a Swiss National Fund Starting Grant to pursue his work at the Faculty of Medicine in Geneva. His laboratory aims at improving our understanding of the parasite’s atypical biology, so that it can be exploited by new drugs. In particular his group is studying how parasites sense environmental signals to time their development and how they divide to build large populations from a small number of founding members.

Member of the bureau Lab Homepage Department of Physiology and Metabolism (PHYME) Miriam.Stoeber(at)unige.ch Tel: +41(0) 22 379 55 07

Miriam Stoeber is an SNSF Assistant Professor in the PHYM Department working in the field of cellular biology and signaling. Research in her team focuses on the signal transduction mechanisms employed by membrane receptors, which are important therapeutic targets. She is a member of the bureau of the Bioimaging Facility since 2020.

Miriam Stoeber obtained her PhD in 2012 at ETH Zurich, where she worked in Prof. Ari Helenius’ group and identified new proteins that regulate cellular entry pathways (i.e. endocytosis). In 2013, Miriam performed a short-term postdoc in Kay Grünewald’s group at the University of Oxford where she employed cryoEM to characterize the assembly and architecture of an endocytic protein coat termed caveolae. From 2014-2019, Miriam was a postdoc at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) in the group of Prof. Mark von Zastrow. Here, she investigated the interplay between receptor trafficking and signaling of opioid receptors and developed novel nanobody-based biosensors to detect receptor activation. Her research combines diverse live-cell fluorescence microscopy approaches to unravel the spatio- and temporal logic of receptor functions with subcellular precision.