Team

Jumana AlHaj Abed

Group Leader Jumana AlHaj Abed

Jumana AlHaj Abed was born in Jordan. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Genetics and Biotechnology from the Jordan University of Science and Technology in 2007. Jumana came to the USA as a Fulbright scholar and completed her PhD in Molecular and Cellular Biology at Southern Methodist University (Dallas, TX) and then joined Mitzi Kuroda’s laboratory at Harvard Medical School (Boston, MA) as a postdoctoral fellow.

She later joined the laboratory of Chao-Ting Wu (Boston, MA) as a postdoctoral fellow and focused her research on the somatic pairing of homologous chromosomes. During that time, her research with colleagues has shown that pairing is a highly structured process (domains, loops, and compartments) with significant functional genome-wide consequences. Jumana is interested in these consequences and their relationship to epigenetic marks. She relies on the fly model system and mammalian cells to understand the differences in parental chromosome interactions across species and utilizes super-resolution microscopy together with Hi-C.

Jumana Al-Haj Abed joined the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg as an Independent Group leader in December 2023.