Three new research groups joining the MPIMG
This fall and winter, Raquel Fueyo, Sedona Murphy, and Johannes Stein will establish their labs at the MPIMG. Their work will strengthen our research in embryogenesis, epigenetic regulation, genome and nuclear organization.
Raquel Fueyo will launch her group at the MPIMG in December. Prior to joining MPIMG, Raquel worked as a postdoctoral scientist in Prof. Joanna Wysocka's laboratory at Stanford University in the Department of Chemical and Systems Biology. She focused her research on the mechanistic aspects of gene expression control in stem cells, particularly transposable elements in human preimplantation development. This work was funded by Bristol-Myers Squibb and the European Molecular Biology Organization. Raquel Fueyo's lab at MPIMG aims to answer fundamental questions about the impact of transposable elements on human embryonic development and disease. The lab focuses particularly on endogenous retroviruses (ERVs), also known as LTR retrotransposons. To investigate ERV function and regulation, her lab will use novel human preimplantation models called blastoids in combination with genome-editing technologies and quantitative tools. Her lab is financed by the Max-Planck-Förderstiftung.
Read more about the Fueyo Lab.
Sedona Murphy has been a group leader at MPIMG since September 2025. She received her Ph.D. in 2023 from Stanford University School of Medicine, working in the laboratory of Alistair Boettiger. For her doctoral research, Sedona studied Polycomb Group Proteins (PcGs), which interact with chromatin by compacting and repressing specific regions of DNA. After completing her doctoral thesis, she became an independent research fellow in the Department of Cell Biology at the Yale School of Medicine, where she established a research program focusing on 3D genome organization and epigenetic memory. At the MPIMG, her research lab will investigate the mechanisms that govern feedback between epigenetic memory and chromatin organization. The group aims to understand how statistical changes in chromatin-interaction frequencies influence gene-regulatory mechanisms in a cell-type-specific manner. They approach research questions from an interdisciplinary perspective, drawing from physics, optics, and biology. In addition to their main research focus, the lab also explores new imaging-based technologies.
Read more about the Murphy Lab.
Johannes Stein joined the MPIMG in October 2025. He earned his Ph.D. at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, where he worked with Petra Schwille and Ralf Jungmann to advance DNA-based super-resolution microscopy for visualizing molecular processes at nanometer precision. He then joined the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and Harvard Medical School, working as a postdoc with George Church and Ting Wu to explore how nuclear organization is linked to genome function, expanding his imaging expertise into cell biology.
Supported by an Emmy Noether grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG)his group will work at the interface of imaging, genomics, and molecular biology to uncover how the spatial interplay of proteins, RNA, and DNA shapes gene regulation and genome function. By developing and applying single-molecule and super-resolution microscopy techniques, his lab aims to study the molecular mechanisms of fundamental nuclear processes such as chromatin looping and nuclear compartmentalization - and to understand how their disruptions can contribute to disease.
