Merlin Lange

Developmental Biologist
& Zebrafish Aficionado

Merlin is an enthusiastic biologist with a strong experience in imaging, genetics and biotechnology. He is interested in understanding the nature of biological organisation, and their developmental processes -- "from fate to form and function"

Merlin joined the multidisciplinary Royer lab at the CZ Biohub to develop new tools, with the ultimate goal of building a comprehensive atlas of vertebrate development. He uses a combination of light-sheet microscopy, image processing & analysis, and single-cell sequencing to describe the mechanisms of Zebrafish tail development.

“Progress in science depends on new techniques, new discoveries and new ideas, probably in that order.” - Sidney Brenner

Prior to the Biohub, Merlin was a recipient of the special researcher postdoctoral program at the RIKEN Center for Brain Science (Tokyo, Japan), in the team of Hitoshi Okamoto, working on Zebrafish neural networks for decision-making. During his PhD, in the lab of Laure Bally-Cuif (CNRS, Gif-sur-Yvette, France), he combined developmental biology and behaviour analysis to develop and study Zebrafish models for neurodevelopmental disorders. Merlin obtained his Masters degree in Cell Signalling and Neuroscience from Paris-Saclay University in 2009. Merlin also serves as an expert consultant in behavioural technologies for a biotech company and was a Neuroscience lecturer at Waseda University and Juntendo University (Tokyo, Japan).