Pavel Tomancak
Pavel Tomancak heads a research group at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) in Dresden, UK

Pavel Tomancak heads a research group at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) in Dresden, where he has worked since 2005. After obtaining his PhD at the EMBL in Heidelberg in 1999, he was a post-doc at the University of California in the lab of Gerald M. Rubin. There, he worked on genome-scale imaging to elucidate the genetic basis of Drosophila melanogaster development. At MPI-CPG, his group focuses on comparative modelling of the development of Drosophila and other flies to infer fundamental rules about the genetic control of animal development and its evolution. He is a great proponent of open-access microscopy technology, and has been closely involved with developing the OpenSPIM project for do-it-yourself light-sheet microscopy, and with the open-source image processing software Fiji. In 2016 he was elected an EMBO member.	Selected publications Globally optimal stitching of tiled 3D microscopic image acquisitions. S Preibisch, S Saalfeld, P Tomancak Bioinformatics 25 (11), 1463-1465 (2009) Fiji: an open-source platform for biological-image analysis. Johannes Schindelin, Ignacio Arganda-Carreras, Erwin Frise, Verena Kaynig, Mark Longair, Tobias Pietzsch, Stephan Preibisch, Curtis Rueden, Stephan Saalfeld, Benjamin Schmid, Jean-Yves Tinevez, Daniel James White, Volker Hartenstein, Kevin Eliceiri, Pavel Tomancak & Albert Cardona Nature Methods volume 9, pages 676–682 (2012) Systematic imaging reveals features and changing localization of mRNAs in Drosophila development. Helena Jambor, Vineeth Surendranath, Alex T. Kalinka, Pavel Mejstrik, Stephan Saalfeld, Pavel Tomancak Elife, 4 Art. No. e05003 (2015) Epithelial rotation is preceded by planar symmetry breaking of actomyosin and protects epithelial tissue from cell deformations. Ivana Viktorinová, Ian Henry, Pavel Tomancak PLoS Genet, 13(11) Art. No. 1007107 (2017) Attachment of the blastoderm to the vitelline envelope affects gastrulation of insects. Stefan Münster, Akanksha Jain, Alexander Mietke, Anastasios Pavlopoulos, Stephan W. Grill, Pavel Tomancak Nature, 568(7752) 395-399 (2019)