The BHF-UK DRI Centre for Vascular Dementia Research is welcoming Dr Henar Cuervo (Spanish National Centre for Cardiovascular Research) for the second seminar of our series.
Dr Cuervo will talk on "Building a vascular network: molecular control of endothelial cells and pericytes during CNS angiogenesis”.
The seminar will take place at 2:30 pm on Thursday 5 February 2026, hosted in person at the Wellcome Auditorium, Queen's Medical Research Institute, The University of Edinburgh and online via Zoom. We warmly invite researchers, clinicians, and students with an interest in vascular dementia to join us for this insightful session.
Speaker Bio
Henar obtained her PhD in Molecular Biology in 2008 from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain. Shortly after, she began her postdoctoral training in vascular biology at KULeuven (Belgium) and later continued at the University of California, San Francisco. In 2014, she was hired as an Associate Research Scientist at Columbia University Medical Center in New York, where she began studying the biology of pericytes. Two years later, she moved to Chicago to start her lab as an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). In 2022, she returned to Madrid where she has been working since with a focus on the regulation of endothelial cell-pericyte communication in health and disease.
Abstract
Angiogenesis, the formation of new blood vessels from pre-existing vasculature, is essential for normal development and plays a central role in numerous pathological conditions. Proper vessel formation depends on coordinated interactions between endothelial cells and pericytes, which provide structural support and regulatory cues. In this work, we identify and characterize molecular mediators governing these interactions, focusing on Notch signaling in pericytes and the deubiquitinase USP8 in endothelial cells. Our findings highlight how pericyte-derived signals influence endothelial cell behavior and how endothelial cells contribute to the precise regulation of angiogenic processes, offering new insights into the cellular and molecular mechanisms that control vascular growth and stability.