Rewinding Multicellular Life

Speaker: Dr Daehan Lee, Associate Professor, Department of Biological Sciences, Sungkyunkwan University, Korea
Series: Gurdon Institute Seminar Series

Daehan Lee is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Sungkyunkwan University, Korea, where he established the Evomics Lab in 2023. Following postdoctoral research at Northwestern University and the University of Lausanne, his research explores how developmental programs originated and evolved to generate biological diversity and complexity. By studying cell-state diversity in choanoflagellates, close unicellular relatives of animals, his lab investigates the evolutionary origins of animal developmental programs. His current work on the moon jellyfish Aurelia explores how new sensory and motor systems, neural circuits, and behaviors emerge during its metagenetic life cycle, and how developmental trajectories can be reversed through retrodevelopment. He is currently a visiting researcher at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, where he is exploring comparative connectomics to understand the developmental evolution of neural complexity.