Amparo Acker-Palmer
Molecular biologist from Spain
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Education and career
Originally from Sueca, Valencia, Spain, Acker-Palmer obtained a B.A. in biology and biochemistry in the University of Valencia in 1991. After graduating, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany in 1996 after obtaining a PhD in biology in the University of Valencia in the same year.
In 2001, she moved to Martinsried to take the position as a junior group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology for six years. At Goethe University, she was nominated as Professor of Cluster of Excellence "Macromolecular Complexes" in 2007.
In 2011, she became the head of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Neurobiology at Goethe University, while working on research in a specialized program known as the Focus Program Translational Neurosciences (FTN). During this time she was a faculty member at the Johannes Gutenberg–University Mainz through her GFK Fellowship. In 2014, she was then elected as a Max Planck Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, where she conducted research focused on the mechanics of nerve and blood vessel communication.
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Research
Acker-Palmer's work focused on the mechanism of the development of nerve and blood vessel at the molecular level. Alongside her colleagues, she published her work in Nature in 2010, as "EphrinB2 regulates VEGFR2 function in developmental and tumour angiogenesis". She won the Paul Ehrlich & Ludwig Darmstaeder Prize for Young Researchers for discovering the similarities between nerve and blood vessel development.
Ephrin is one of the axon's guiding molecules during the development of the central nervous system. Her research examines the role of one of Ephrin's receptor's transmembrane ligand, Ephrin-B2 in particular, in developmental angiogenesis. However, the validity of the study's data was placed under scrutiny by Nature's readership due to its questionable figures.
To clarify the situation, a letter along with supplementary information was issued by the authors explaining the errors made. According to Nature, although several images were incorrectly labelled, the errors have no effect on the experiment's original conclusion. The authors have also conducted another experiment for further verification, which confirmed their results.
Honours and awards
- Received a Doctoral Fellowship from the Spanish Government (1992–1996)
- Received a Doctoral Extraordinary Award from the University of Valencia, Spain (1997)
- Elected as the EU Fellow in the "Training and Mobility of Researchers Programme" (1997–1999)
- Won €60,000 from the Paul Ehrlich & Ludwig Darmstaeder Prize for Young Researchers for her research in discovering the similarities between nerve and blood vessel development (2010)
- Received the Gutenberg Research Fellowship Award (2012)
- Elected as a Max Planck Fellow at the MPI for Brain Research (2014)
- Received a €2.5 million award from the European Research Council (ERC) (2015)