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

Oliver Herd

Postdoctoral Research Associate

I graduated from the University of Manchester in 2016 where I worked for a year at Boehringer Ingelheim (Germany). During my PhD in the laboratory of Prof. Ian Hitchcock I characterised the sources of thrombopoietin in the haematopoietic stem cell microenvironment and studied the effect of sustained immune thrombocytopenia on the haematopoietic system. In 2021 I joined the Luis Lab to characterise the role of the bone marrow microenvironment in the early stages of leukemia development.

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.

Hanrui Zhao

MRes Molecular and Cellular Biosciences

I am Hanrui Zhao from China. I completed my undergraduate degree in Biological Sciences and also conducted projects regarding protein characterization and viral infection. I am now working on the establishment of a mouse model to investigate the early stages of leukemogenesis using various experimental and computational methods.

Sisi Chen

Undergraduate Student - BSc Biological Sciences

I'm a final year undergraduate student studying Biological Sciences in the Department of Life Science at Imperial College. I joined Tiago's group for my final year project with the topic of "Heterogeneity of the hematopoietic stem cell niche at single cell resolution".