Cell scientist to watch – Verena Ruprecht

Verena Ruprecht received her PhD in Biophysics from the Johannes Kepler University in 2010 for her work on developing single-molecule super-resolution imaging tools in the lab of Gerhard Schütz. Following a research visit in Didier Marguet's lab at the Centre d'Immunologie de Marseille-Luminy (CIML) in France, she moved to the Institute of Science and Technology (IST) in Austria for a postdoc, working jointly with Carl-Philipp Heisenberg and Michael Sixt. There, she discovered a unique amoeboid cell migration mode in early zebrafish embryos, termed stable-bleb migration. Verena started her independent laboratory at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona, Spain, in September 2016. Her group combines genetic and biophysical methods with multi-scale imaging and mathematical modelling to study cellular dynamics in embryo development. In 2020, Verena was selected as an EMBO Young Investigator and in the same year awarded an HFSP Young Investigator Grant for a collaborative project to study the biophysics of zebrafish fertilization.