Dr. Julieta Alfonso
Dr. Julieta Alfonso studied Biology at the Universities of Mar del Plata and Buenos Aires (UBA) in Argentina. She performed her PhD thesis in Biotechnology and Molecular Biology in the lab of Prof. A.C.C. Frasch at the IIB-UNSAM (Argentina) in collaboration with the labs of Prof. E. Jazin at the Uppsala University (Sweden) and Prof. E. Fuchs at the DPZ in Göttingen (Germany), investigating the molecular changes in the brain in response to chronic stress in different mammalian species. After her PhD, she moved to Germany in the year 2006, funded by an IBRO (International Brain Research Organization) Outstanding Fellowship, to do a postdoctoral training in the lab of Prof. H. Monyer at the Heidelberg University Hospital where she studied the migratory routes of newborn neurons in the postnatal mouse brain. She continued working in the field of postnatal and adult neurogenesis in the labs of Prof. H. Monyer and Prof. P. Seeburg (Max Planck Institute, Heidelberg) supported by a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellowship (European Commission) and later by a stipend from the Olympia-Morata Programme (Heidelberg University). During her years as a postdoc, she identified different molecular factors involved in the activity of postnatal neural stem cells and young neurons, in particular, the Diazepam Binding Protein (DBI) which she demonstrated it plays a key role in adult neurogenesis. In the year 2014, she started her own Junior group at the Department of Clinical Neurobiology, DKFZ (Heidelberg), funded by a grant from the BMBF (Federal Ministry of Education and Research, Germany). Her research is mainly focused on neural cell proliferation in the developing and adult brain, both in health and disease (i.e. brain cancer).