Tomas Pachano joins FWF’s ESPRIT programme
Tomas Pachano, a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Alexander Stark, will join the Austrian Science Fund’s (FWF) ESPRIT programme. With three years of research funding and career-development opportunities from the FWF, he aims to map how pathogens manipulate human cells.
The Austrian Science Fund has awarded a prestigious ESPRIT fellowship to Tomas Pachano, postdoc in the lab of Alexander Stark, for his project, “High-throughput Discovery of Pathogen Effector Functions”. With the funding, Pachano will map how pathogens take control of human cells and build a functional atlas of pathogen effector proteins.
Bacteria, viruses and parasites deliver effector proteins into infected cells to switch host processes on or off. Thousands of such effectors are known from genome sequencing, but only a small fraction has ever been functionally characterised. What most of them actually do inside a human cell remains unknown.
Using a collection of almost 11,000 effector genes from more than 680 species, Pachano will aim to close that gap at scale. He will test them in human cells for three readouts central to infection: modulation of the NF-κB immune pathway, blockade of programmed cell death, and genome-wide changes to the host transcriptome. His project aims to produce the first pan-pathogen functional atlas of effector activity and reveal key control points in human cell biology.
Tomas Pachano studied Agrobiotechnology at the University of San Martín in Buenos Aires, where he first worked on the parasite Trichomonas vaginalis. He earned his PhD at the Center for Molecular Medicine Cologne under the supervision of Alvaro Rada-Iglesias, studying how orphan CpG islands determine the compatibility between poised enhancers and their target genes. In 2022, he joined the IMP as a postdoc in the lab of Alexander Stark, where he combines his background in host–pathogen biology with the lab’s expertise in high-throughput functional genomics. Pachano previous work was supported by a DAAD fellowship (2017), and by an EMBO Postdoctoral Fellowship and a Vienna BioCenter VIP² Postdoc Fellowship, both awarded in 2022.
About the ESPRIT programme
The ESPRIT programme (Early-Stage Programme: Research – Innovation – Training) is a funding initiative of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) designed to support the professional development of early-career researchers. It gives postdoctoral researchers across all disciplines the opportunity to lead independent research projects and establish their research profiles. The programme provides funding for up to three years.
Related links
Stark lab