Diplom Biologist; Priv.-Doz. Dr.

I am a biologist and started my scientific career with engineering of cell-permeable proteins. Tissue-engineering appeared as a fascinating new field of research to me and I was wondering if there will be fully artificial organs and even designer tissues with exciting new feature some day in the future (just think of the third generation Terminator). For this reason I joined Jürgen Heschelers laboratory to work on stem cells and tissue engineering.

If I am not in the lab you find me in the garden, motorbiking or on a ride with the horses.

Veterinarian

Anne is a veterinarian with experience in equine practice and performs experiments in the scope of a DVM study co-supervised by Prof. Burk (Tiermedizinische Hochschule Giessen). Anne is focussing on aspects of equine stem cell technologies to identify novel treatments of equine orthopaedic diseases. This type of research brings stem cell technology to the clinics and paves the way for applications in humans as well. 

Technical assistant: Human Stem Cell Culture and Differentiation

Daniel is managing the cell culture laboratory for our group. He is performing all experiments with transgenic cell lines in the frame of the collboration with GoBio GmbH. In addition Daniel holds great expertise in murine and human pluripotent stem cell culture and cardiac differentiation. Together with Sarkawt he is managing the culture and differentiation of the human stem cells and the development of protocols and methods for scalable production of these cells for preclinical approaches. In his free time Daniel is a master in martial arts.

Technical assistant: Cell Culture Technologies

Ellen is specialist on murine stem cell culture and differentiation. She is performing murine cardiomyocytes differentiation and culture for the group and supports our intensive collaboration with the cardiothoracical surgery department. Furthermore, Ellen has broad skills in the laboratory including molecular biology and preparation of cell culture hydrogel substrates from polyacrylamide.

Postdoctoral Researcher: Electrophysiology of cardiac cell therapy

Gabriel Peinkofer is interested in the course of cardiomyocyte engraftment after transplantation into infarcted hearts. The integration of the cells is analysed by a method called "sharp electrodes". Gabriel transplants green fluorescent cells and analyses the electrical engraftment of the cells by impaling them with sharp glas electrodes to quantify the quality of electrical coupling and the degree of maturation. Specific skills include cell culture, cell transplantation in a murine model of cardiac infarction and electrophysiology.

(Project in collaboration with Priv.-Doz. Dr. Marcel Halbach, Heart Center Cologne)

MSc.

Karim has a background of human genetics and biomedical sciences from Iran. He joints the lab to apply cellular and molecular cutting edge approaches aiming to push forward cardiovascular research specifically in the area of cardiac failure and fibrosis.

Karina supports the team as scientific assistant. She is mainly focussed on supporting our team with the human stem cell culture and performs a collaborative project on improving the purity of stem cell derived cardiomyocytes for preclinical applications.

Philipp is performing his medical doctor thesis in the laboratory. He is interested to optimize a microfluidics-based workflow to generate micro-tissues for 3D cell culture and as a starting material for transplantation purposes.

BSc. Biology; MSc. Physiology; PhD

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Sarkawt Hamad has obtained is PhD in the Interdisciplinary Program Health Sciences. His key expertise is human pluripotent stem cell biology and differentiation. Sarkawt develops novel strategies for scalable differentation of cardiovascular cells from human iPS and is the expert for bioreactor technology in our group. Furthermore, he has broad experience in imaging and statistics.

BSc. Biology

Tasneem has studied Biomedical sciences at Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg and performed her Master thesis project in my group. In the frame of her thesis Tasneem has focussed on effects and mechanisms of magnetic cell retention. The results of the study lay the ground for a PhD thesis in the field of cardiac cell replacement therapy.

MSc. Education in Biology and Geography

Lisa Münchhalfen is a PhD student at the Medical Faculty. In her project she is focussing on the process of organ complementation in the mouse in order to define a strategy to ultimately replace the cardiac lineage with derivatives of foreign stem cells in a interspecies chimaera.

MSc. in Chemistry

Stephanie is a chemist and works on novel technologies of hydrogel-based cell culturing strategies. She is performing her PhD thesis in a collaboration between the Institute of Physical Chemistry, Cologne and the Center for Physiology bringing together expertise from different fields of natural sciences.

Anna Lena Weiß, Dr. rer. medic.

Carlos O. Heras Bautista, MSc. Biotech. Eng., Dr.

Denise Roggan, BSc.

Farooq Mohammad, PhD

Jenni Lam, Dr. rer. medic.

Lukas Linden, BSc.

Mariam Fouad, MSc.

Marianne Yassa, MD

Mira Barsoum Hanna, MD

Nelly Mikhael, PhD

Osama Abdelaziz, Dr., Professor of Pediatrics

Raja Sahito, Dr.

Rouven Gotthardt

Shahab Khalaf, MSc.

Uta Chrzanowski, BSc. 

Wael Attia, Dr., Professor of Pediatrics

Xiaowu Sheng, Dr., Current affiliation: Xiangya School of Medicine, Changsa, China

Yasmin Mokhtar, Msc.