Bio:

Alex Schier has been Professor and Director of the Biozentrum at the University of Basel, Switzerland since 2018. He started his lab in 1996 at the Skirball Institute of the New York University School of Medicine and joined Harvard University in 2005, where he was the Leo Erikson Life Sciences Professor and Chair of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology. Schier is a pioneer in developmental biology. He defined the first morphogen-inhibitor pair for Turing-like pattern formation, discovered the microRNA-induced degradation of maternal mRNAs and dissected the role and regulation of Nodal signaling. He and his collaborators developed creative technologies to establish zebrafish as a model system, including the establishment of large-scale genetic screens and the development of behavioral profiling and whole-brain imaging to analyze drugs and mutants. Schier and his collaborators pioneered methods for understanding development at global scales. Through genomic barcode editing technology, single-cell sequencing and spatial transcriptomics they reconstructed the lineage relationships, spatial location, gene expression and differentiation trajectories of thousands of cells. Schier has been recognized by NIH MERIT and PIONEER awards, an ERC Advanced Grant, and election to EMBO, Academia Europaea, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the US National Academy of Sciences. His research was featured as Science Breakthrough of the Year 2018. Schier’s impact is also evidenced by the success of his many collaborators and his trainees. 20 of 24 graduate students in the Schier lab went on to postdoctoral research positions, and 33 of 40 postdocs started their own labs at leading institutions, including Yale, Princeton, Caltech, and University of Cambridge.