Sibylle Vonesch obtained her PhD from ETH Zurich, Switzerland, in 2015. During her doctoral studies with Ernst Hafen, she employed genome-wide approaches to study how intra-species genome variation shapes hereditary traits. In 2015, she joined Lars Steinmetz’s group in Heidelberg, Germany, as a postdoctoral researcher, where her work focused on genomics and the development of multiplexed genome editing technologies in the yeast S. cerevisiae. In 2021, she established the Laboratory for Genome Editing and Systems Genetics at KU Leuven and the VIB-KU Leuven Center for Microbiology. Her team develops CRISPR-based high-throughput genome editing tools for microbes and applies them in large-scale genetic screens to study fundamental principles in molecular and complex trait genetics. 

Ruben Vazquez Uribe studies microorganisms and how to harness them to improve human health, protect the environment, and enhance food quality and production. His research bridges microbiology, synthetic biology, and biotechnology to explore and engineer individual microorganisms and complex microbial communities. Ruben earned his Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the Technical University of Denmark, conducting research under the supervision of Morten Sommer. In 2020, he became group leader and co-led the Bacterial Synthetic Biology section at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability at the Technical University of Denmark. Since 2023, he has been with the VIB Center for Microbiology as Head of Fermentations in the group of Jeroen Raes. Throughout his career, Ruben has developed and applied novel technologies in synthetic biology, gene editing techniques, microbiome research, food fermentation, functional metagenomics, biosensors, and cultivation-based multiplexed phenotyping. By leveraging microbes, he aims to develop innovative solutions in health, pharmaceuticals, environmental science, and food technology.

Olaf Klingbeil is a group leader at the VIB–KU Leuven Center for Cancer Biology (CCB) and an assistant professor in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at KU Leuven, where he heads the Laboratory for Functional Genomics and Gene Regulation. He earned his doctorate (Dr. rer. nat.) at Humboldt University Berlin in collaboration with Bayer Pharma, then spent his postdoctoral years (2017–2024) at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory before starting his own group in 2025.

His lab studies how cancer cells adapt to therapy and become resistant. Rather than treating resistance as a fixed genetic endpoint, his group views it as a dynamic, time-dependent process — asking not only which genes and pathways matter, but when they act, in what order, and whether their effects can be reversed. This work is anchored in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), a cancer notorious for its plasticity and treatment resistance, though the underlying questions apply broadly across cancer types.

To get at these questions, the lab builds and applies CRISPR-based functional genomics — the focus of this course. This includes pooled single-gene and combinatorial screens, paralog-targeting strategies that expose redundancy simpler screens miss, and inducible systems that add temporal control, read out with single-cell and chromatin profiling. As one example of what the approach reveals, he used paralog-focused CRISPR screening to identify the MARK2 and MARK3 kinases as catalytic co-dependencies of YAP/TAZ signaling — a redundancy-driven resistance mechanism that candidate-by-candidate methods would have missed.

Today his group is building a dedicated CRISPR functional genomics platform at VIB–KU Leuven Center for Cancer Biology, supported by an FWO Odysseus grant, to map how signaling and transcriptional networks reorganize under therapeutic pressure.