In April 2024, we are delighted to welcome Professor Claudia Kathe to the DNF as a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Starting Grant fellows.
Claudia Kathe obtained her PhD in Neuroscience and Pharmacology from King's College London, UK, under the supervision of Professors Lawrence Moon and Stephen McMahon. During this time, she developed gene therapies to improve mobility after corticospinal tract injury. She then completed her post-doctorate at EPFL, in Professor Grégoire Courtine's laboratory, where she worked on the development of tools to identify and study the different populations of neurons in the spinal cord. Her work led to the discovery of a population of spinal neurons necessary for the recovery of walking after spinal cord injury.
For the launch of her own laboratory at DNF, Claudia Kathe will focus on movement disorders that develop following brain and spinal cord injury, as a consequence of neurodegeneration or neurodevelopmental disorders. Her laboratory aims to adopt a molecular neuroscience approach that combines single-cell sequencing, spatial transcriptomics, anatomical viral tracing and optogenetic manipulations to map the different populations of neurons in the spinal cord. She intends to reveal their diversity, function and responses under pathological conditions. Her research is aimed at improving therapeutic interventions for movement disorders.
We welcome Claudia Kathe and her first PhD student, Farha Bouteldja, and look forward to the exciting advances their research will bring.