James P. Cleland, PhD

I am a postdoc in the Odom lab at the German Cancer Research Center and Heard lab at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (Heidelberg, DE).

After growing up in sunny Brisbane, I did my undergraduate training at the University of Queensland and University of California, Berkeley. Then, I relocated to Dresden to do my PhD at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics. Between thesis work on planarian regeneration and summer interludes at the Marine Biological Laboratory, I developed a passion for the extreme biology of weird and wonderful creatures hiding in plain sight. Since starting my postdoc in Heidelberg in Jan 2022, I have been trying to figure out why male livers are more susceptible to cancer than female ones. Toward this goal, I apply a wide range of experimental and computational techniques and collaborate with dozens of colleagues at DKFZ, EMBL and beyond.

In the future, I plan to return to my roots - planarian regeneration - with a fresh perspective and new tools. Specifically, I will 1) develop terrestrial planarians as new model systems for studying whole-body regeneration on land and 2) use comparative approaches to try and figure out how and why some are better regenerators than others.