Jean-Christophe Marine

Jean-Christophe Marine obtained his PhD from the University of Liège, (Belgium, 1996), and was a Howard Hugues Medical Institute Fellow at the St Jude Children's Research Hospital (Memphis, USA, 1996-99). He was a Marie Curie Fellow at the European Institute of Oncology (IEO, Milan, Italy, 2000-2003).

He became a junior VIB Group leader in 2004 at the University of Ghent (Belgium) and moved his laboratory to the University of Leuven (KULeuven) in 2010 where he is now Professor, senior VIB group leader and Director of the VIB center for Cancer Biology. He received several national and international awards for his work on p53 modifiers and melanoma biology and was elected EMBO member in 2020. His interests focus on the mechanisms by which cancer-specific non-mutational (i.e. epigenetic and (post-) transcriptional) events modulate tumor initiation, progression and therapy outcome. His laboratory uses mainly melanoma as a disease paradigm and aims at developing in vivo genetic tools and applying cutting-edge technologies to dissect the mechanisms underlying melanoma initiation, growth, metastatic dissemination, emergence of inter-and intra-tumor heterogeneity, plasticity and therapy resistance.