Join us!
Current opening(s):
We always interested in hearing from interested candidates as we may be able to apply for grants together to fund your stay in the lab. When actively recruiting, we always post job ads on BlueSky and LinkedIn. Please see below about ideal candidates. We are fully committed to ensuring an open, honest, and inclusive work enviroment and top priority will be given to candidates who are committed to these values.
Affiliations:
Graduate students will be part of the graduate school at Lund University. The lab is looking for members who are excited about applying wet lab and/or computional approaches to study the intersection of regeneration and immunology. The lab is a collaborative and supportive team in a fantastic environment at Lund University Faculty of Medicine in the Department of Laboratory Medicine within the division of Molecular Medicine and Gene Therapy. We are also part of the Wallenberg Centre for Molecular Medicine Lund and the Lund Stem Cell Center Please get in touch with Nick via email if you are interested in talking about joining the lab.
Ideal Candidates:
All members of the lab are expected to be kind, honest, open-minded, and industrious. This does not mean working 24 hours a day or not taking vacation. This means coming to lab and being a supportive and kind lab mate, giving and taking advice, being open to others’ ideas and cultures, and overall being respectful and as helpful as possible. In addition, people who enjoy optimizing how the lab functions, how we interact, and overall want to come in each day and try and make the lab a better place are highly desired. We firmly believe that being happy leads to better work and that working as a team is more fun, efficient, and leads to more reproducible and better quality science than working alone. We also greatly value diversity and want everyone to strive to make the work enviroment as inclusive to everyone regardless of their race, age, color, disability, faith, ancestry, national origin, citizenship, sex, sexual orientation, economic class, ethnicity, gender identity, or gender expression.
Current projects:
We have a diverse array of exciting projects ongoing in the lab (see below).
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Delineating the role of adaptive immunity in complex tissue regeneration. We have recently generated the first immunodeficient newts and shown that adaptive immunity is dispensable for complex tissue regeneration (see Publications). During this work, we uncovered that the regenerating niche has immunosuppressive function. We are now focused on understanding immunosuppressive mechanisms present in newts. This involves teasing apart mechanisms of central and peripheral tolerance and if and how these impact regenerative capacity.
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Exploring cancer resistance mechanisms in newts. Newts have famously high cancer resistance (see seminal work by Charles Breedis). This fascinating feature has not been thoroughly investigated from the molecular perspective. We are now exploring how regenerative capacity may endow tumor resistance. Generating newts that lack tumor suppressor genes and genotoxic challenges are allowing us to better understand the biological underpinnings of tumor resistance. As an added bonus, we are interested in comparing how the immune response to tumors converges or diverges from that of regenerating tissue.
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Genomics of regeneration. In a fruitful collaboration we have recently assembled the genome of the newt Pleurodeles waltl. This is enabling an entirely new approach to study salamanders. We are now delving into the genomics of limb regeneration, assessing how gene expression is regulated prior to and throughout regeneration. We are also interested in how transposable elements contribute to newts regenerative capacity.
We have other projects in the works and are always happy to hear from people interested in joining the lab and for them to pitch any ideas that would be interested to explore using the salamander model system!