Javiera VILLAR-LEAL

I am a postdoctoral fellow from Chile with a strong interest in the biology of myeloid cells, particularly in cancer and tissue homeostasis. I completed my PhD in the laboratory of Elodie Segura at the Institut Curie, where I focused on identifying molecular regulators of human monocyte differentiation.

Since joining Dr. Florent Ginhoux's lab in 2022, I have been studying the heterogeneity of macrophage subpopulations in neuroblastoma using high-dimensional technologies. My goal is to characterize macrophage functions and their interactions within the tumor microenvironment by mining public single-cell RNA sequencing datasets and validating my findings through multiplexed imaging and spatial transcriptomics.

Additionally, I have been developing an in vitro model of activated/tolerogenic dendritic cells (mregDCs) derived from human bone marrow progenitors. This project aims to uncover targetable molecular pathways that drive the homeostatic activation of dendritic cells.