Claudio Cortes Rodriguez

I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Professor Paul Riley's group, interested in the cellular behaviours and mechanisms of heart development.

I goy my BSc from the University of Chile and then moved to Australia, where I obtained my PhD in Molecular Genetics and Development, studying rare genetic diseases (ciliopathies) as part of bench-to-bedside approaches. I then focused on heart development and moved to France for a postdoctoral position, where I specialised in developing new live imaging approaches to heart development in mice. I also focused on epithelial biology, Epithelial-to-mesenchymal transitions and how adhesion (cell-cell and the ECM) shapes development.  As a side project, I also studied the role of Retinoic acid signaling in cardiac and skeletal muscle development.

I have now joined the Riley group to study human cardiac development as part of the Wellcome Trust Human Developmental Biology Initiative, imaging and mapping the cells that make up the human heart. I'm focusing on lineage-tracing and cell behaviour during compartmentalization of the heart. We have a growing number of collaborators for this, including the Srinivas group (DPAG) and the Rawlins group (Cambridge).