Meritxell Huch

Dr Meritxell Huch is a Director and Scientific Member at the MPI-CBG, in Dresden. She obtained her PhD at the Center for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, Spain in 2007 and moved to the Netherlands at the Hubrecht Institute, for her postdoc. There, she pioneered the generation of organoids for non-intestinal tissues including stomach, liver and pancreas. Following these studies, she obtained a independent position at the Gurdon Institute, University of Cambridge where she moved her research focus to the understanding of liver tissue both during regeneration and disease and where she has made very important contributions. In 2019, she was awarded the prestigious Lise Meitner Award from the Max Planck Society and moved to Germany to continue her research on tissue regeneration, organoid models and cancer. Her lab established the first human liver organoid models derived from human liver tissue from both healthy and diseased patients. Also, her lab generated the first liver cancer organoid model and described that liver embryonic progenitors, hepatoblasts, are a functionally heterogenous and bi-potent at the single cell level. In addition, her studies in regeneration unveiled that epigenetic remodelling, in the form of DNA (hydroxy)methylation changes, is crucial to induce cellular plasticity during regeneration. For these achievements, she has received several awards including the Hamdan Award for Medical Excellence, The Women in Cell Science Prize from the British society, the EMBO young investigator award, the BINDER prize and most recently the Hilde Mangold Award by GSCN. In May 2022 she has been appointed a Director and Scientific Member at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics.