Biography

** The Dries lab will open its doors on August 1st, see www.drieslab.com !**

I am a computational biologist currently working at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute as a post-doc in the labs of Rani George, Guo-Cheng Yuan and Kwok-Kin Wong (untill the lab moved to NYU). I was born in Belgium where I did my Bachelor and Master in Biomedical Sciences at KU Leuven and was offered a scholarship to perform my master thesis in developmental biology in the lab of Anming Meng at Tsinghua University in China. This thesis was a close collaboration with the group of Danny Huylebroeck at KU Leuven, where I did my PhD studies and started a project at the crossroads of development and systems biology.

During my PhD I became interested in transcriptional dynamics, single-cells and genomics and gradually moved away from the (wet) bench to a (dry) desk. As a post-doc I continued in this direction and I am specifically interested in how individual cells from a multi-cellular organism react to changes in their environment. What is the immediate transcriptional respons and its implication? How do they reach or (un-)lock their current transcriptional state? What is the contribution of cellular heterogeneity and the spatial microenvironment, such as a specialized niche or the immune system? I started to embark on some of these questions in drug treatment and/or resistance models for small-cell lung cancer and neuroblastoma and I’m looking forward to expand our acquired insights in those and other types of cancer and model organisms.

Alltogether, I am a biology explorer with extensive wet and dry lab training (both 5+ years), which enables me to facilitate the interaction between highly-specialized fields. In this role I’ve led and contributed in conceptualizing and driving complex projects, that required high-dimensional analysis, which ultimately lead to a better biological understanding. Altogether, I believe that research is - more than ever - a teamsport which requires a collaborative effort to fully understand and utilize the generated data to answer biological questions. As such, I believe that groundbreaking science is based on 3 fundamental pillars, (1) well-crafted and thoughtfull experiments that embrace (2) novel technologies and are led by (3) data-driven decisions.

Here you can download my CV

• rubendries @ gmail.com
• Longwood Center, 1st Floor, Boston, MA