Confirmed Speakers

Dr Holger Gerhardt, Cancer Research UK, London Research Institute, UK & VIB, Belgium

Holger Gerhardt studied Biology in Darmstadt and Neurobiology in Tuebingen, Germany, where he also completed his PhD in CellBiology in 2000. He received the Reinhold-und-Maria-Teufel Prize for his Dissertation on early Blood-Brain Barrier development. During his post-doctoral research with Christer Betsholtz at Gothenburg University, Sweden, Dr. Gerhardt conceptualised the endothelial tip and stalk cells; a discovery that kick-started his work on endothelial guidance and vascular patterning. Since 2004, he has been a group leader at the London Research Institute-Cancer Research UK at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London. Dr. Gerhardt is an EMBO Young Investigator (2007) and recipient of the prestigious Lister Prize (2008). In 2009, he was promoted to Senior Group Leader at the LRI, and in the same year received the Walter Fleming Medal of the German Society for Cell Biology in recognition for his outstanding achievements in Cell Biology. Since 2010, Dr. Gerhardt also heads the Vascular Patterning Laboratory at the VIB, KU Leuven, Belgium, building an integrated research team across the two institutions to combine expertise in vascular disease models with his cell biology approach to unravel principles of vascular network formation in development and disease. In 2011, Dr. Gerhardt became the first European to receive the Judah Folkman Award of the North American Vascular Biology Society.

« Go Back