Patrick Humbert
Professor Patrick Humbert is the Director of the La Trobe Institute for Molecular Sciences (LIMS), a world-leading multidisciplinary biomedical research institute at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. Patrick is an internationally recognized scholar in cancer research with PhD training in immunology at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute for Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia, and postdoctoral training in genetics and cancer research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, USA. Patrick led a lab for over 15 years at the Peter MacCallum Comprehensive Cancer Centre, Melbourne, Australia, before becoming La Trobe University’s inaugural Professor of Cancer Biology since 2016. Patrick has published over 100 peer reviewed articles and received multiple awards including a Merck Fellowship, Special Fellowship of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society of America, and consecutive Career Development Fellowships and Senior Research Fellowship from the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia. Patrick’s current research interests include investigating the molecular mechanisms of asymmetry and tissue architecture in cancer and regeneration, identifying the evolutionary origins of cancer in the first multicellular animals, and characterising the effects of space and microgravity environments on regeneration and cancer progression. In particular, Patrick has been collaborating with Prof Bernd Schierwater (TiHo, Germany) and Dr Jens Hauslage (DLR, Germany) since 2019, developing one of the simplest animals on Earth, Trichoplax, into a new model organism to examine the evolutionary origins of cancer, cell polarity and tissue architecture and how gravity has shaped these mechanisms throughout evolution. This has led to multiple cooperative sounding rocket experiments to examine physiological, behavioural and gene expression change in response to short term microgravity.
Abstracts this author is presenting: