Prof. Nadia Mercader

Nadia Mercader Huber received her bachelor’s degree in Biology from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETHZ, Switzerland) in 1998, and was awarded her PhD in Molecular Biology by the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain, in 2003. The subject of her doctoral studies, carried out in Miguel Torres’s laboratory (CNB-CSIC), was the role of Meis genes during proximodistal vertebrate limb development. After her PhD, she continued her study of the function of Meis genes during limb regeneration in urodeles in collaboration with Elly Tanaka’s laboratory at Max Planck Institute of Cell Biology and Genetics, Germany). During her postdoc with Carl Neumann at the EMBL (Germany), Nadia Mercader Huber studied early events in limb induction using zebrafish as a model organism. Next, she joined the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares CNIC (Spain) in 2007 as a group leader. During that time, her group investigated the mechanisms of cardiac regeneration and the development of the epicardial layer using the zebrafish as an animal model. In 2013 she was awarded an ERC starting grant to study the mechanisms of cardiac regeneration in the zebrafish.

Since August 2015, Nadia Mercader is Full Professor at the Institute of Anatomy, University of Bern (Switzerland). She is also visiting professor at CNIC. In 2019, an ERC Consolidator Grant allowed her group to continue the studies on heart regeneration. In 2020 Nadia Mercader was awarded the Max Cloetta Prize. Since 2021 Prof. Mercader is individual member of the Swiss Society of Biomedical Research. She was Vicedean of Research and Young Academics from 2020 to 2024 and currently holds the position of Deputy Dean at the Medical Faculty.

Dr. Christian Zuppinger

Christian Zuppinger studied Biology at the University of Zurich, finishing with a master's degree in cell/plant biology in 1995 with Prof. Urs-Peter Roos. Then, he did a PhD thesis at ETHZ (Federal Institute of Technology), Institute of Cell Biology, with Prof. Hans M. Eppenberger, working with adult rat cardiac cardiomyocytes in long-term culture. The topic of the thesis was the de-differentiation of adult cardiomyocytes and the following re-formation of intercalated disk-like structures, which was investigated using N-cadherin fused to green fluorescent protein. After his PhD, he started a position as researcher and lab manager at the University Hospital Bern, Cardiology Department, where he worked since the year 2000 on a number of projects together with Prof. Thomas M. Suter in the field of cardio-oncology, i.e. the mechanisms of adverse effects of cancer therapies on the heart. This interdisciplinary approach was met with interest in the oncology and cardiology medical fields and led to a fruitful collaboration with the lab of Prof. Douglas Sawyer (Boston University, Vanderbilt University) and a number of stays at his lab for learning new methods and to collaborate on projects about the mechanisms of neuregulin signalling on the survival of cardiomyocytes in stress conditions.

Christian Zuppinger was awarded grants from the Swiss National Science Foundation, Oncosuisse, Swiss Heart Foundation, Innosuisse, and industry partners. From 2015 onwards, he worked on developing all-human, stem cell-derived, 3D-culture models of the myocardium to investigate side effects of cancer therapies. In 2022, he became a co-applicant in an SNF project (HeartX, NRP79) led by Prof. Marco Osterwalder (Cardiology and Univ. Bern) in which human cardiac organoids are employed to study the genetic regulation of the development of the early human cardiac ventricle.