Antonia Hufnagel Sauerland

Antonia is a Postdoc at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research in the research group of Professor Romain Barrès.

Antonia completed her Bachelor of Science degree in Molecular Medicine at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg in Germany. Afterwards she obtained her Master of Research at the University of Cambridge as part of a Wellcome Trust Master and PhD programme. Her PhD was completed in the lab of Prof. Susan Ozanne at the Institute of Metabolic Science, where she studied the effect of maternal obesity and metformin on maternal, placental and fetal health in a murine model.

In her Postdoc, Antonia has now shifted her focus towards male reproduction. She has been associated with the GECKO Consortium since January 2022. Antonia’s studies aim to investigate cross-talk via extracellular vesicles and how this might be involved in male epigenetic inheritance via transferal of epigenetic information from the body to the sperm cells. The aim of this research is to help elucidate the mechanisms of how environmental effects can change the sperm epigenome.