Merlin Lange

Scientific biography

Before joining the Institut de la Vision as Junior Group Leader, Merlin Lange was a Principal Scientist at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub in San Francisco, where he led the development of Zebrahub (zebrahub.org) a multimodal atlas of zebrafish development integrating light-sheet microscopy, omics technologies, and computation, with Loic Royer. Prior to the Biohub, he was a recipient of the Special Researcher Postdoctoral Fellowship at the RIKEN Center for Brain Science in Tokyo, working on neural circuit development in the team of Hitoshi Okamoto. He completed his PhD with Laure Bally-Cuif (CNRS, France), combining developmental biology and behavioral analysis to model neurodevelopmental disorders in zebrafish.

How can a small pool of progenitor cells generate the specialized cell types that form the visual system capable of perceiving the world?

Merlin Lange's group addresses this question by combining cutting-edge imaging, transcriptomics, and computation to build a multimodal atlas of the developing retina. Using both animal models and human embryonic tissue, they work closely with Alain Chédotal’s team to investigate the development and evolution of neural diversity in the retina. Their goal is to decode the molecular principles that govern retinal lineages and organization, and how these mechanisms support visual function resilience, and disease.