Nitzan performed her PhD in the field of Cancer Biology at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Israel.
She did her Post-doc fellowship at the thab of Prof. Robin Lovell-Badge at the Francis Crick Institute, studying mammalian sex determination.
She recently established her independent research group at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, where they study sex determination and gonad development.
I am currently an Associate Professor at the University of East Anglia, UK. Our research takes an evolutionary approach to study genetic and genomic processes involved in sexual reproduction. I finished my PhD in 2006 at the University of Sheffield, UK and started my own lab in 2011 at Uppsala University, Sweden where I stayed until 2018. I have been awarded an ERC Starting Grant in 2013 and a Wallenberg Academy Fellowship in 2015. Our research is also supported by HFSP and NERC.
Medical studies and promotion (Dr. med., University of Ulm; Germany); Postdoc: Department of Physiology, SIU Carbondale, Illinois (USA); Habilitation (Dr. med. habil., Anatomy; University of Ulm); Schering AG, Berlin; Heisenberg Fellow (DFG) OHSU, ONPRC, Portland/Beaverton, Oregon (USA); Professor (Molecular Anatomy) 1996, TU Munich, since 2000 LMU, Munich, since 2015: Biomedical Center Munich
Professor Sarah is a graduate of the University of Adelaide (BSc 1983; PhD 1993). Most of her career has been in Adelaide after periods at the University of Alberta (Edmonton, Canada) and University of Gothenburg (Gothenburg, Sweden). She was an NHMRC Principal Research Fellow until appointment to Director of the Robinson Research Institute in October 2013, after 18 years in the NHMRC Fellowship scheme.
Her research focus is mammalian reproduction and development, particularly immune system regulation of fertility and pregnancy. She strives to advance understanding of the fundamental biology of conception, embryo implantation and early development, and mechanisms by which environmental factors impact the conception environment to program fetal development. Notably, she has discovered a novel role for seminal fluid factors in signalling to the female reproductive tract after insemination, with consequences for female immune adaptation for pregnancy and offspring health. Her research offers new insights on causes of infertility and subfertility in couples, and potential to devise new approaches for diagnosing and managing infertility in men.
She is an elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences, and a Fellow of the Society for Reproductive Biology.
Dr. Ruiz-Herrera is Associate Professor at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain) at the Department of Cell Biology. Her research group has as a main objective to study of the mechanism(s) that are responsible for the origin and maintenance of mammalian genome integrity through a multidisciplinary approach, combining computational analysis and whole-genome comparisons with cutting-edge experimental technologies. More specifically her group is currently working on (i) unveiling the conservation and functionality of the high-structural organization of mammalian genomes with special focus on the germline and (ii) the identification of the genetic basis of reproductive isolation and barriers of gene flow in mammalian natural populations.
