DrIngmar Schoen

I have been awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the German Science Foundation (DFG; 2010), a habilitation fellowship from the Holcim Science Foundation (2014-15), and a Marie Slodowska Curie Action Individual Fellowship (2017-19). I have given invited talks and master classes at the International Society on Thrombosis and Hemostasis (ISTH) Congress 2022 and 2024; the annual meeting of the Society on Thrombosis and Hemostasis Research (2014); at the PicoQuant international workshop (2015); at the ORS musculoskeletal symposium (2017); and invited seminars at Universities in Cork, Birmingham, Berlin, Munich, and Würzburg.

My main scientific contributions lie in the fields of platelet mechanobiology, extracellular matrix (ECM) biology, and super-resolution microscopy (SRM). My postdoctoral work developed and refined quantitative microscopy modalities and custom labelling strategies. Several of these techniques have been utilised by other research labs, and some of my work has been influential for prominent SRM developments, i.e. DNA-PAINT. My more recent work applied SRM and advanced data analysis to elucidate structural cell biology in the context of mechanobiology. Since becoming fully independent as PI in 2017, we focused on platelets, with our most important contribution to date being the elucidation of fibronectin fibrillogenesis, topography sensing, and contractility regulation by platelets. 

I have secured prestigious Frontiers for the Future Project funding (€240k) from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI). I have also helped to secure SFI infrastructure funding for the Super-Resolution Imaging Consortium (SRIC) facility (€1.4M). Current projects are funded by industry (Octapharma, €466k) and the Irish Blood Transfusion Service (€300k).

We communicate our research findings to the wider research community using different channels, with increasing reach as reflected by high Altmetric scores (>100) of recent publications. Open science is part of our mission, making new software developed in our projects available and re-usable for other researchers. To popularise SRM, we extensively collaborate with other labs, and I am proud to have coordinated the establishment of the first dedicated user facility for SRM in Ireland at my University, which is also the result of my increasingly successful funding track record and the acknowledgement of my SRM expertise.