Julieta Alfonso &
Lázaro Centanin
Julieta Alfonso is an associate editor at Nature Cancer, a research journal dedicated to cancer research, covering preclinical findings, clinical work, and societal issues.
After obtaining her master’s degree in biological sciences, Julieta studied the effects of social stress on gene expression and neuronal structure in the hippocampal formation during her doctoral work at the University of San Martín in Buenos Aires. For her postdoc, she joined Hannah Monyer’s lab at Uniklinikum Heidelberg to investigate postnatal neurogenesis in mammalian models. She uncovered developmental pathways and migration dynamics of GABAergic neurons, and extensively characterized a modulator of neural cell proliferation in the mammalian brain. She continued working on neurodevelopment and malignant growth in the brain with her own group at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), and later she joined Nature Cancer in 2024.
Lázaro Centanin is a professor at the Centre for Organismal Studies (COS) where his research focuses on stem cell dynamics, growth, and adaptation processes. He mainly employs the Japanese rice fish medaka, but also uses other species of the Oryzias genus and zebrafish for comparative approaches.
Following his undergraduate studies in biological sciences at the University of Buenos Aires, he obtained his doctorate at the Leloir Institute on oxygen sensing in Drosophila melanogaster. In his postdoctoral work at EMBL Heidelberg, Lázaro identified and characterized retinal stem cells in medaka through various lineage tracing techniques such as blastula transplantations or Gaudí, a multicolor labeling toolkit for life-long analysis of stem cell lineages. He became a junior group leader at COS in 2013 where initial research efforts were directed at the neuromast stem cell niche while more recent work has been aimed at elucidating stem cell hierarchies in the gill. Research aside, Lázaro is very involved in teaching both in bachelor’s and master’s programs and has a penchant for various cooking-related analogies when presenting his work.
