Hanh Vu
Hanh Vu is a Group Leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg. Born in Vietnam, she has built an international scientific career driven by a deep curiosity about how living organisms regulate, evolve, and adapt to changing environments.
Hanh completed her PhD at the University of Utah and the Stowers Institute for Medical Research under the mentorship of Dr. Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado, where her work focused on the evolution of organ systems using planarian flatworms as a model system. She discovered that the planarian excretory system is molecularly, structurally, and functionally similar to the mammalian kidney and, in doing so, established planarians as a powerful new system for modelling human kidney disease.
Very much in love with planarians but eager to change both research question and environment, she joined the laboratory of Dr. Jochen Rink at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, and later at the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences in Göttingen, to tackle a problem that has motivated her work ever since: how do animals get their size, and why do sizes differ so much across species?
The Vu group combines genomics, imaging, and comparative approaches to study how body size is controlled and evolves in planarian flatworms — a remarkable group of more than 1,500 species inhabiting marine, freshwater, and terrestrial environments worldwide.
