Claudia Katharina Petritsch

Claudia earned her PhD (Dr. rer.nat) at the Institute for Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna, where she trained in cancer signaling, and identified crucial regulators of growth factor receptor kinase signaling. Her postdoctoral studies on neural stem cells and asymmetric cell division in the Lab of Dr. Yuh Nung Jan at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and University of San Francisco, California implied for the first time a minus-end directed myosin in the process of cell fate determination. During two years as an instructor and head of a research group in Munich, Germany, Dr. Petritsch and her team showed that cell fate determinants use a bimodal mechanism (diffusion and active capturing) for proper intracellular location. She returned to UCSF to conduct translational research, and apply her combined expertise in stem cells and signaling on the study of brain neoplasms and human stem and progenitor cells. Dr. Petritsch is an expert in oligodendrocyte progenitor cells, and cancer stem cells, and her team's emphasis is on intra-tumoral heterogeneity, in vitro and in vivo cancer model development, and tumor-immune interactions. Her research identified conserved mechanisms of cell fate determination in mammalian brain progenitors and led to a paradigm shift in understanding how brain progenitor cells self-renew and differentiate. She guided the generation and distribution of several immune competent mouse models for studies of the glioma immune microenvironment. A major effort of her team is to facilitate the use of fresh surgical tissue from neurosurgeries for research.