Speaker Details

Colinda Scheele

Dr. Colinda Scheele has been a junior group leader at the VIB Center for Cancer Biology since June 2020 and an Assistant Professor at KU Leuven, Department of Oncology since 2021. She completed her PhD in 2020 at Utrecht University, focusing on Cancer, Stem Cells, and Developmental Biology. Her PhD research, conducted in the lab of Professor Jacco van Rheenen at the Hubrecht Institute and the Netherlands Cancer Institute, identified pubertal mammary stem cells and elucidated their role in mammary gland branching morphogenesis. Dr. Scheele's PhD research also explored how mammary stem cells contribute to tumor initiation and progression. During her PhD, she earned a prestigious Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds PhD fellowship. Her PhD work was recognized by several awards and prizes, including the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Award 2020 and a Bright Mind Award for excellent interdisciplinary research.

Dr. Scheele's lab focuses on how healthy tissue architecture and environment can either prevent or promote the various steps of tumorigenesis utilizing and developing state-of-the-art imaging approaches, including 3D whole organ imaging and 4D intravital microscopy. To accommodate and disseminate their imaging technologies, the lab hosts an intravital imaging expertise center. Their imaging tools are complemented with quantitative lineage tracing, (spatial) omics approaches and quantitative modeling to further elucidate the mechanisms of tissue transformation. In addition to in vivo studies, the lab also developed advanced organoid models derived from model systems and human patient samples, recapitulating healthy and transformed tissue dynamics, and morphology in vitro. The Scheele lab received funding from national and international funding sources, including FWO, FEBS, NIH and ERC.