Julia C. Lang

Research

Working as a postdoctoral researcher in Keira Melican’s Team at AIMES, my research focuses on the interaction of Staphylococcus aureus and other species with human skin during colonization. Our collection of advanced human skin models including xenograft in vivo models, in vitro explants, or tissue-equivalents, allows us to study the host immune response in the most clinically important background. Together with cutting-edge techniques we try to answer questions like ‘How can our skin immune system differentiate between pathogenic and commensal Staphylococci’. We recently identified a specific skin resident immune cell type that is probably responsible for that differentiation.

Previously I studied the influence of bacterial metabolic status in the capacity of Staphylococcus aureus to survive within professional and non-professional phagocytic cells, as well as the impact of the host cell response in the physiology of intracellular S. aureus. To perform these complex host-pathogen interaction studies, I use a photoconvertible fluorescence reporter system to track the proliferative activity of S. aureus intracellularly and subsequent dual RNA-Seq analysis to determine differential gene expression of intracellular S. aureus with different metabolic states.

I am leading a PhD course in Clinical and Molecular Bacteriology at Karolinska Institutet.
My teaching experience also includes lecturing in the Joint PhD Summer School 2024 at Keio University in Tokyo as well as several undergraduate and graduate courses here at KI.

Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, 2024-2025
Postdoctoral Researcher, Interplay between S. aureus and helathy human skin, Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, 2022-2024
Postdoctoral Researcher, Development of a drug to treat Staphylococcus aureus infections and prevent exacerbation of a life-threatening pneumonia (funded by CARB-X, in cooperation with the Lead Discovery Centre GmbH (LDC)), Infection Immunology, Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research, 2021-2022
Research Assistant, Culturing of Planctomycetes, general microbiological experiments, Characterization work for new discovered planctomycetes, Microbial Cell biology and Genetics, Leibniz Institute DSMZ – German Collection of Microorganisms and Cell Cultures, 2015-2016

PhD in Biology (Dr. rer. nat.), Investigation of Staphylococcus aureus intracellular survival strategies using a photoconvertible reporter system as biosensor for bacterial metabolic state, Infection Immunology, Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research, 2021
Master of Science - Biology, Infection Biology and Microbiology, The role of immune responsive gene 1 (irg-1) in the course of infections caused by the human pathogen Staphylococcus aureus, Technical University Braunschweig, 2017
Bachelor of Science - Biology, Microbiology and Immunology, Invasiveness of hypervariable Staphylococcus epidermidis Isolates in human host cells, Institute for Molecular Infection Biology (IMIB), Julius-Maximilians-University of Würzburg (JMU), 2015

Anna-Lena Gürtler, Electrospun skin patches for the treatment of psoriasis, 2024
Maria Drösemeyer, 2024
Andreas Brutscher, Profiling the immune response of healthy human skin to colonization by different Staphylococcus sp., 2022

Member, KI Junior Faculty, Karolinska Institute, 2024-
Other, Assistant Equal Opportunities Officer, Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research, 2020-2021