Meet the Crew...
Meet the Crew
Ms. Carmen Moreno Gonzalez
Carmen Moreno-Gonzalez is a PhD student focusing on creating bioengineered models of neural crest development, with a studentship from the Francis Crick Institute in collaboration with Prof. Karen Liu at King’s College London.
Research Assistant who is currently investigating RNA metabolism and local protein translation in iPSC-derived motoneurons as well as glial-neuronal interactions in ALS.
Before starting in the Serio Lab, Carmen studied a BSc (Hons) in Biotechnology at the Polytechnical University of Madrid followed by a MSc in Neuroscience at King’s College London. Carmen joined the lab in April 2017 during her MSc final dissertation to help generating a bioengineered platform for long axons motoneurons.
Outside the lab, Carmen enjoys food, country music and long political discussion on the composition of paella.
Ms. Kelly O’Toole
Kelly O’Toole is a PhD student whose project is focused on using bioengineering techniques to develop a glial network in vitro, as a platform to study astrocyte interactions and metabolism. She hopes that this could aid in disease modelling and drug screening, amongst other applications. Previously, she studied at the University of Manchester and graduated with a MSci (Hons) in Pharmacology. For her master’s project she investigated the ‘obesity paradox’ and stroke, which centred on the long-term effects of obesity on neuroinflammation and brain repair. It was during this project that she first became interested in the functions of glial cells in the brain and has not stopped studying them since!
In her spare time, she likes to spend time with family and friends, going to gigs and drinking tea whilst watching reruns of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares.
Ms. Cathleen Hagemann
Cathleen started her PhD in October 2018 in this lab after a Master’s in Neuroscience at University of Tuebingen. She is interested in mitochondrial biology, live imaging techniques and -mostly- caffeine.
Her project is currently focused on investigating the mitochondrial dynamics and transport processes in bioengineered spinal circuitry models to understand the processes involved in maintaining homeostasis within neuronal processes.
She does not do free time, but she takes pleasure in sitting in a dark room light only by the reflected glare of her fluorescent proteins, listening to heavy metal.
Ms. Pacharaporn “Poy" Suklai
Poy is a PhD student focusing developing bioengineered platforms to study cortical circuits and the developing architecture of the human cortex.
Mr Matthew Bailey
Matthew is a research assistant currently working on several project focused on microfabrication, 3D bioprinting and disease modelling.
He joined the lab in 2020 as a placement MRes student to work on a novel pipeline for microfabrication in biological devices.
Dr. Thomas Kavenaugh
Thomas is a joint postdoc between our group and the Ameer-Beg lab at King’s College London, and he works across several microscopy development and imaging projects across the two labs.
Dr Sudeep Joshi
Sudeep is a postdoc focusing on 3D bioprinting and neural tissue engineering. He is currently focusing on developing novel instrumnent systems to enable complex assembly and anlysis of neural tissue constructs for disease modelling.
Ms Maddy Carpenter
Maddy is a join-PhD student in our laband in the Ameer-Beg lgroup at King’s College London, supported by a BBSRC LiDO iCase studentship. She is developing an advanced multimodal volumetric imaging systems to visualise dyanamic cellular processes in neurons and astrocytes within 3D cultures.
Pablo Müller Eduardo y Cajal
Pablo is a Neuroscience Llama with a very malleable disposition and an interest in microscopy. His job is to maintain everybody in the lab sane and well adjusted.
He obtained a degree from the Pachamama Institute of Technology (PIT) and his field of expertise is seating on workstations while someone analyses data, silently judging them.
In his spare time, he likes to plot for world domination.