Rita Mateus
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Biosketch
Rita Mateus is a joint group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics and the Cluster of Excellence Physics of Life in Dresden, Germany. She has always been interested in understanding how cells coordinate precise growth and form of tissues, allowing them to become fully functional.
To this end, Rita did her PhD in Prof. Antonio Jacinto’s laboratory, at IMM and CEDOC, where she investigated how, upon injury, the zebrafish caudal fin precisely regenerates its shape and size, over and over, error-free. During her postdoc in the group of Prof. Marcos Gonzalez-Gaitán, at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, Rita turned to development to investigate how morphogens control organ growth, using the zebrafish pectoral fin as a model. In parallel, she became more and more interested in understanding size and shape at the subcellular level, in particular to try to understand the physics and cell biology underlying structural colorsthat require the formation of specific organelles with particular morphologies. Now, in her laboratory,
Rita is pursuing these two research avenues to explore the biophysical properties involved in controlling growth across these very different scales.
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