People
Heather Machado, PhD
hem48 @ cam.ac.uk
Group Leader
Dr. Heather Machado is an evolutionary genomicist who uses somatic mutations to understand the changes in our immune system with age and disease. She earned her PhD from Stanford University, where she studied population genomics and genome evolution. She then moved to the Wellcome Sanger Institute, where her postdoctoral research focused on somatic mutation in the adaptive immune system in normal aging and phylogenetic lineage tracing in abnormal hematopoiesis. She is interested in applying evolutionary genetic methods to understand the role of the adaptive immune system in aging and disease and the co-evolution of immune and non-immune cells.
Sebastian Diegeler, Dr. rer. nat.
sd2085 @ cam.ac.uk
Research Associate
Dr. Sebastian Diegeler received his doctoral degree in radiation biology in 2020 from Saarland University in cooperation with the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Cologne, Germany. His research on the role of transcription factor NF-kB in the radiation-induced bystander response was supported by a Helmholtz SpaceLife Sciences doctoral scholarship. He then moved to the UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, Texas, USA as a Mary Kay Ash Charitable Foundation International Postdoctoral Scholar and investigated spatial relationships in the tumour immune microenvironment with regard to radiation and immune therapy. Coming to the University of Cambridge (MRC Toxicology Unit), he developed an analysis pipeline for cellular responses to toxicants in differentiated human lung epithelium.
With his passion for understanding intercellular communication he joins the Machado Lab as a Research Associate to study co-evolution and response dynamics of immune cells in cancer.