Georg Halder is Professor at the University of Leuven and the Flemish Institute for Biotechnology (VIB) in Belgium. He earned his Ph.D. in 1996 from the University of Basel in Switzerland under the guidance of Walter Gehring and was a postdoctoral fellow with Sean Carroll at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, USA. Prior to his current position, he was a faculty member at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston Texas (2000-2012).

Dr. Halder has a long-standing interest in organ growth control, regeneration, and cancer. His laboratory was instrumental in the discovery of the Hippo pathway in Drosophila and the identification of upstream regulators such as the NF2 tumor suppressor, mechanical forces, and cell polarity. His group uses Drosophila to discover novel mechanisms of growth control and the mouse liver to study regeneration and cancer development. His group is also involved in developing Hippo pathway inhibitors for cancer therapy.

Seminar Topic: Once upon a time there was the perfect cancer target YAP…