Meet the IRFLUVA research team, today introducing Professor Katja Simon
21 August 2024
Katja Simon is a global expert in immune ageing and a Distinguished Professor. She works at University of Oxford and Max Delbruck Centre (MDC). In early April, Katja Simon became the head of the “Autophagy in the Immune System” laboratory at the MDC. She and her collaborators at Cardiff University and University of Oxford have been researching how long-lived immune cells use the process of self-digestion to continually renew themselves in patients since 2021. Katja has spent much longer than this studying immune cell autophagy in other organisms, as autophagy is essential for many livings things including yeasts and all plant, animal, and human cells.
Katja says, ‘Cells are sustainability specialists. They eat all the organelles and larger molecular complexes that are no longer needed – in order to then reuse the waste products to build new structures. The name given to this cellular recycling process is “autophagy. Without autophagy, cells could not develop or function normally. They would also age faster without it.”
Katja grew up in Hamburg and Paris, she completed her university studies in Berlin: first at the Free University and then at the German Rheumatism Research Center (DRFZ Berlin), where she was the institute’s first female PhD candidate. Simon then held postdoc positions in Marseille and Oxford, where she and her husband, British immunologist Professor Quentin Sattentau, raised three children.