Assist. Prof. Sven Vilain

After obtaining his master’s degree in bio-engineering - cell and gene biotechnology at the VUB (Free University in Brussels, Belgium), he pursued a PhD at the KU Leuven, Belgium under the supervision of Prof. Bassem Hassan. During his PhD, he used the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster as a model organism to study the role of the proneural gene atonal during neurogenesis. To facilitate this study, he developed novel gene targeting approaches. He continued his scientific career as a Postdoc in the lab of Prof. Patrik Verstreken, where he sought to gain an understanding of the aetiology of Parkinson’s disease. For this purpose, he used Drosophila as a model organism and studied the function of various genes involved in hereditary forms of this disease. Together with his colleagues, he found that mutations in these genes cause defects in presynaptic terminals via different biological pathways. He is currently Assistant Professor at Istanbul Medipol University, Turkey where he uses the axolotl salamander to unravel the mechanisms of regeneration.