Darren Gilmour

Department of Molecular Life Sciences
University of Zurich
Winterthurerstrasse 190
CH-8057 Zurich
Switzerland

Building / Room: Y55-K-14
Phone: +41 44 635 31 52

Darren gained a PhD from the University of Cambridge, where he worked in the lab of Martin Evans, one of the inventors of Embryonic Stem (ES) cell technology. He then joined the lab of Janni Nüsslein-Volhard at the Max Plank Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen as a postdoc. It was during his time in the Nüsslein-Volhard lab that he first became fascinated by the question of how differentiated organs are assembled from collectively migrating cells. In 2005 he set up his first lab in the Cell Biology Biophysics Unit at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg.  There the lab developed a number of novel imaging approaches that provided novel insights into development, such as the discovery that migrating tissues can determine their own directionality through local self-generated guidance gradients.  Since their move to the University of Zürich in 2017, the lab continues to investigate mechanisms link cell behaviour and cell fate during organ formation. At UZH they are exploring this fundamental question using a selection of in vivo model organs and a more global ‘in toto’ approach. 

Curriculum Vitae