Lucas Pelkmans

Lucas Pelkmans studied Medical Biology at the University of Utrecht and did his Ph.D. in Biochemistry at the ETH Zurich. He was then a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany. At the age of 29, he became an assistant professor at the Institute of Molecular Systems Biology of the ETH Zurich. He was elected the Ernst Hadorn-endowed Chair at the University of Zurich 5 years later in the Department of Molecular Life Sciences, where he is currently a full professor. Lucas Pelkmans was chairman of the Scientific Executive Board of SystemsX.ch from 2013-2018 and was elected as a member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) in 2015. Lucas Pelkmans is an inventor on several patents in the area of image-based systems biology and is a co-founder of the biotech company 3V-Biosciences (now Sagimet Biosciences) with Ari Helenius and Urs Greber. He received the ETH medal for best Ph.D. thesis, won the European Young Investigator Award, and received an ERC junior, consolidator, and advanced grants.

Dr. Pelkmans has pioneered scale-crossing image-based approaches in systems biology. This stood as the basis for high-throughput image-based genetic perturbation screening and enabled his group to make the discovery that variability in the phenotype of genetically identical mammalian cells is determined by higher-scale properties that emerge from the collective behavior of cells in populations, allowing accurate predictions of single-cell behavior (including virus infection, signaling, membrane lipid composition, endocytosis, and gene expression) through statistical as well as mechanistic multi-scale mathematical approaches. His group also developed image-based transcriptomics approaches to quantify, at single-molecule resolution, the abundance of transcripts of thousands of genes in tens of thousands of single cells and more recently 4i, which allows the collection and integrated interpretation of >40-plex protein readouts from biological samples at high-throughput from the millimeter to the nanometer scale. In the area of intracellular condensates, his group has discovered that the dual-specificity kinase DYRK3 controls the dissolution of multiple intracellular condensates during stress recovery and mitosis in mammalian cells and applies their technologies to the high-throughput image-based genetic perturbation screening of multiple membrane-less organelles in mammalian cells.