Maciej Kerlin grew up in a small village in northern Poland, in the midst of hills, lakes and forests. His scientific curiosity stems from the plastic microscope with a mirror, that he got for his 5th birthday. For his university education he moved to Warsaw, where he obtained B.Sc and M.Sc in Molecular Biotechnology studying chromatin dynamics in plants. In the meantime, as he cannot stay in one place for too long, he went to Paris for the Erasmus exchange and after the university he spent over a year in the USA as a visiting scholar, where he studied DNA replication in zebrafish. During these experiences he developed a taste for epigenetics and imaging, which pushed him to pursue the PhD path at Institut Curie in Paris. There, he studied the dynamic relationship between genome structure and function in human cancer cells using single-molecule RNA and DNA FISH techniques, which got him excited about the fields of genome organization and gene regulation. Maciej joined the Vastenhouw Lab in 2022 as a postdoc and he studies zygotic genome activation using a puntastic FISH-on-fish approach.
Outside of the lab Maciej enjoys traveling, bike and hike trips, but you can also find him in the bars and restaurants, enjoying local specialties.
