People

Tiago C. Luis, PhD

Tiago Luis

Principal Investigator
Sir Henry Dale Fellow of the Wellcome Trust and The Royal Society

I graduated from the University of Lisbon (Portugal) in 2005 and since then my research has focused on the mechanisms regulating haematopoietic stem cell (HSC) function and the extracellular signals these cells receive from their niche. During my PhD studies in the laboratory of Prof. Frank Staal and Prof. Jacques van Dongen at Erasmus Medical Centre Rotterdam (The Netherlands) I studied the role of the Wnt-signalling pathway in haematopoiesis. I demonstrated a stage/lineage-specific and dosage-dependent effect of Wnt-signalling throughout adult haematopoiesis. After obtaining my PhD in 2010 I joined the laboratory of Prof. Sten Eirik Jacobsen at the University of Oxford (UK) as an EMBO postdoctoral fellow, to investigate the cellular pathways of lineage commitment from HSCs. I characterized the first haematopoietic progenitors that migrate and colonize the foetal thymus, where they encounter a specific microenvironment eliciting further differentiation through the T-lymphocyte lineage. In 2014 I as awarded a Kay Kendall Leukaemia Fund Fellowship to investigate the bone marrow niche of platelet-biased HSCs.

In 2018 I was awarded a Sir Henry Dale Fellowship from the Wellcome Trust and the Royal Society to start my laboratory at Imperial College London. My research focuses on the molecular mechanisms by which the bone marrow niche regulates HSCs, in homeostasis and in the development of haematological malignancies.

Lab Members

Marine Secchi

PhD Student - Wellcome Trust Program - The Molecular & Cellular Basis of Infection

My name is Marine Secchi, I’m from France. During my MRes I worked on malaria and the T cell response to influenza before diving into the field of haematopoietic stem cells. For my PhD I will look at the bone marrow niche and the molecular mechanisms regulating platelet-biased haematopoietic stem cells in response to platelet-depletion and malaria infection.

Henry Xu

PhD Student

My name is Jiarui (Henry) Xu and I come from China. Following graduation from Imperial College London in 2019 with BSc in Biological Sciences with Research Abroad, I worked as a research assistant at Wellcome-MRC Cambridge Stem Cell Institute for 18 months. During this time, I contributed to projects including the characterization of human foetal haematopoiesis using single-cell RNA-seq. In 2021, I joined Tiago Luis group at Imperial College as a PhD student. My research focus on the mechanisms regulating the quiescence and proliferation of haematopoietic stem cells.

Filippos Maniatis

MRes Molecular and Cellular Biosciences

My name is Filippos Maniatis and I am originally from Greece. I obtained my BSc in Biological Sciences from Imperial College London (ICL) in 2020 and I have previously worked as an undergraduate research assistant where I used advanced flow cytometric analysis to investigate hepatocellular carcinoma progression. Following this research experience, I became a member of the Tiago Luis group in 2021 at ICL, as a MRes student, to investigate the mechanisms regulating the quiescence and activation states of haematopoietic stem cells.

Paula Horta Hugues

MRes Systems and Synthetic Biology

My name is Paula Horta and I come from Spain. I did my BSc in Biotechnology at the University of Edinburgh where I performed computational drug discovery targeting RNA-binding proteins in Staphylococcus aureus for my dissertation. I am now doing my MRes in Systems & Synthetic Biology at Imperial in Tiago Luis and Bernadette Byrne Labs where I will be investigating the mechanisms regulating hematopoietic stem cells proliferation.