Lab members

Vivien Horváth, Group Leader

Vivien did her PhD at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology/Spanish National Research Council (Barcelona, Spain) studying the role of transposable elements as gene regulators in adaptation of Drosophila melanogaster. She then continued as a Postdctoral researcher at the Lund Stem Cell Center/Lund University (Lund, Sweden), where her work focused on understanding the role of TEs in neuronal cells. In 2025 December Vivien was appointed as a Wallenberg Fellow at Umeå University and opened her research group at the Department of Medical and Translational Biology. 

Azam Mahmoudi Aznaveh, Postdoctoral researcher

Azam earned her PhD from Tehran University of Medical Sciences, where she studied the molecular mechanisms of metabolic diseases, with a focus on pancreatic islet biology and beta-cell function. Her current research investigates how transposable elements alter gene expression in glial cells and contribute to neurodegenerative disease, with a particular focus on X-Linked Dystonia-Parkinsonism. She uses advanced cellular reprogramming and imaging techniques to study pathogenic alterations in oligodendrocytes, combined with genomics approaches to uncover the role of transposable elements in these processes.

Ali Demirci, Project Assistant

Ali did his undergraduate studies at the University of East Anglia, where he manually curated and annotated transposable elements in the acorn barnacle Amphibalanus improvisus to study their contribution to its evolution. He then completed his master's at University College London, where he modelled the phenotypic evolution of SARS-CoV-2 across successive variants. His current research focuses on the bioinformatics analysis of multi-omics datasets, including Oxford Nanopore long-read sequencing and 10x Genomics snRNA-seq, to investigate the role of transposable elements in ageing oligodendrocytes.

Bhakti Jadhav, Master student

Bhakti completed her undergraduate studies in Biotechnology from Mumbai University, India. She then spent two years working in the social sector focusing on educational equity. Although her early research experience was in microalgae, she became increasingly interested in understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying neurological disorders. Motivated by this, she is pursuing a Master’s in Molecular Biology from Lund University. At the Functional Neurogenomics Lab, she is working with characterization of oligodendrocytes to understand the underlying pathophysiology of X-Linked Dystonia-Parkinsonism.