Huch, Meritxell
Biography
Meritxell Huch is a stem cell biologist and director at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics whose research is focused on developing organoid models to study the properties of mammalian tissues during homeostasis and regeneration.
Huch earned her BSc in Pharmaceutical Science from the University of Barcelona in 2001 and her PhD in biomedicine at the Center for Genomic Regulation in 2007. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Hubrecht Institute for Developmental Biology and Stem Cell Research, Huch worked in Hans Clevers’ lab where she developed methods for growing organoid models of the stomach, liver, and pancreas. Following her postdoc, Huch became a junior research group leader at the Gurdon Institute at the University of Cambridge in 2014. In 2019, she was awarded the first Lise Meitner Excellence Program Prize of the Max Planck Society and moved her lab to the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics.
Huch has received the Otto Bayer Award, Hilde Mangold Award, Hamdan Award for Medical Excellence, the Women in Cell Science Prize of the British Society, the EMBO Young Investigator Award and the BINDER Prize. She is also a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and the Honorary Professor for stem cell research and tissue regeneration at the Medical Faculty of the TU Dresden.