James Cleland

James was born and raised in sunny Brisbane, Australia. After doing his undergraduate training at the University of Queensland and University of California, Berkeley, he relocated to not-so-sunny but otherwise fantastic Dresden, Germany to do his PhD at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics. Between his thesis work on planarian flatworm regeneration and summer interludes at the Marine Biological Laboratory in the USA, he fell in love with the extreme biology of weird and wonderful creatures hiding in plain sight. Since Jan 2022 he is a joint postdoc between the Odom group and the Heard group up the hill at EMBL, trying to figure out why many male organs are more susceptible to cancer than their female counterparts and generally learning as much as possible that he can hopefully someday harness to learn new and interesting things about the aforementioned weird and wonderful creatures. When not in the lab James can be found travelling (back and forth between DKFZ and EMBL, but also in more exotic places), trying to make a decent cappuccino and chasing after an increasingly-mobile toddler.