Biography
Sir Henry Dale Fellow and Senior Research Associate, University of Cambridge, UK
Florian Merkle studied biology at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and obtained his PhD in neuroscience at UCSF, where he studied the origin and potential of adult neural stem cells. As a postdoctoral fellow, Florian adapted CRISPR/Cas9 for human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs), alerted the field to recurrent p53 mutations in hPSCs, and pioneered methods to differentiate hPSCs into the hypothalamic cell populations that regulate appetite and are dysfunctional in obesity. The Merkle lab at the University of Cambridge now integrates these technologies to illuminate the mechanistic basis of obesity and identify new targets to treat obesity and neurodegeneration.
