Julia C. Lang

Working as a postdoctoral researcher in Keira Melican’s Team at the Department of Medicine Solna, 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.

Supervision to doctoral degree

• Andreas Brutscher, 2026-
• Anna-Lena Gürtler, Electrospun skin patches for the treatment of psoriasis, 2026

Other researchers who have defended a thesis

• Maria Drösemeyer, 2024-2025
• Andreas Brutscher, Profiling the immune response of healthy human skin to colonization by different Staphylococcus sp., 2022-2023