Short biography
Thomas Graf made his PhD in Tuebingen in 1969 in Genetics. After a postdoctoral training at Duke University (US) he first worked as a group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Virology in Tuebingen and then at the German Cancer Center in Heidelberg for 5 years. In 1983 he joined the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) as a Programme Coordinator. In 1998 he moved to a professorship at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York and returned to Europe in October of 2006,
where he now works as a Programme Coordinator at the Center for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona. He has received several prizes, including the Paul Ehrlich Prize, and has organized many international conferences. He is an elected member of EMBO, Academia Europaea and of the Executive Board of the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR). He was/is also a member of numerous journal editorial boards, currently including that of Cell Stem Cell and Stem Cells. Research interests
We are interested in the question of how adult stem cells differentiate into distinct lineages, using the blood forming system as a model. To understand the molecular mechanisms of cell fate specification we reprogram already specialized cells by forced expression of lineage specific transcription factors. Currently we are focusing on how a macrophage transcription factor can silence the gene expression program characteristic of B lymphocytes and replace it by a macrophage program. Understanding cell differentiation is not only interesting for basic science but also relevant for the etiology of blood cell cancers (leukemia) and for its possible applications in regenerative medicine. Key words
Blood cell differentiation, hematopoietic stem cells, reprogramming, transcription factors, transdifferentiation