This is an in-person event, taking place in the Polani room, 8^th Floor, Tower Wing of Guy's Hospital. The speakers will be attending in-person, so please come along to the talk if you're available. No registration is required and everyone (internal or external to King's) is welcome!

Make sure you take advantage of this opportunity by attending as the talk won't be recorded.  

This is an in-person event only

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"KRAB zinc finger proteins expand the domestication potential of transposable elements"

Speaker: Dr Michael Imbeault (KCL)

Michael completed his PhD in Quebec, Canada, where he worked on the transcriptomics of HIV-1 infection in primary T lymphocytes. He then undertook postdoctoral training in Lausanne, Switzerland, in the laboratory of Didier Trono, where his work on KRAB zinc finger proteins revealed an unexpected role for these factors in the evolution of gene regulation. He was a Sir Henry Dale Fellow (Wellcome Trust and Royal Society) and Group Leader in Cambridge from 2017 to 2025, and has recently joined King’s College London as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Medical and Molecular Genetics.

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"Rare disease in space and time"

Speaker: Professor Sergi Castellano (UCL)

Sergi is a computational and evolutionary biologist, with previous training at CRG, Cornell University, HHMI, and the Max Planck Institute. He is currently Professor of Genomics at UCL, based at the Zayed Centre for Research into Rare Disease in Children. He also serves as Academic Lead of the Genomics Platform at UCL and of UCL Genomics, the university’s largest genomics facility. His research integrates single-cell and spatial genomics with computational and experimental approaches to study rare disease, with a particular focus on improving diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment for children within the NIHR GOSH BRC. His lab develops novel spatial methods to assess rare disease models and lab-grown organs for transplantation, evaluating their functional validity and response to therapies such as cell and gene therapies, antisense oligonucleotides, and CRISPR. He will present recent examples of these approaches and their application to diseases with no current cure.