Principal Investigator

Associate Professor

Jan J. Zylicz

Associate Professor Jan J. Zylicz’s research focuses on the first days of development. His goal is to uncover basic principles of how the embryo interacts with its environment and apply this knowledge to improve the efficiency of fertility treatments.

Associate Professor Jan J. Zylicz
Associate Professor
Jan J. Zylicz
Location: UCPH, Denmark
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Associate Professor Jan J. Zylicz wants to understand how the embryo’s environment affects its development and life after birth. This is relevant when the embryo is cultured after an in-vitro fertilisation (IVF). Associate Professor Zylicz and his team study how such an environment is sensed by the embryo and how it affects the way it produces energy. This in turn directly impacts which genes are being switched on and off. By using state-of-the-art technology, Associate Professor Zylicz and his team provide deep mechanistic insights into these processes. Improved understanding of how the embryo adapts to altered environments could help improve the efficiency of IVFs.

Associate Professor Zylicz is a principal investigator at reNEW’s reSOLVE theme at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He is a recipient of the prestigious Sapere Aude (DFF) and Lundbeck Fellowships.

In his previous work with Professor Azim Surani at the Gurdon Institute, University of Cambridge, UK and Professor Edith Heard at the Institut Curie in Paris, France and at EMBL in Heidelberg, Germany, Associate Professor Zylicz has contributed to our understanding of how genes are turned off in early mouse development. Since the establishment of his team in 2020, Associate Professor Zylicz focuses on how human and mouse embryos interact with their environments.

reNEW researchers have a strong track record of scientific excellence in stem cell biology

They have performed pioneering work in stem cell research spanning different tissue and cell types, different technological advances and different stages of applied research. This provides an unprecedented international opportunity to utilise the combined wealth of knowledge, complementary skills sets and clinical experience across reNEW to push stem cell discoveries toward translational outcomes.