Robin is a world leading expert in lipid biology focusing on the cell biological functions of lipids. His group at the University of Oxford studies how non-vesicular lipid transport edits the membrane composition of mitochondria to govern cell fate determination in differentiation, metabolic adaptation and regulation of cell death during stress. Newest work describes how lipid droplets facilitate the remodelling of mitochondria to enable metabolic flexibility and pro-survival – a research direction with future applications in metabolic disease and neuro-degeneration.
Robin did his postdoc with Tom Rapoport at Harvard Medical School where he studied the fusion of ER membranes by dynamin-like GTPases and uncovered an unexpected function of ER morphology in whole body lipid homeostasis. During his PhD at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics with Kai Simons, he developed widely adapted organelle immunoisolation methods which led to the first quantitative lipidome of purified eukaryotic organelles. Robin’s early work shed light on the importance of lipids during formation of secretory vesicles at the trans Golgi network.
