My research focuses on understanding how transposable elements and their epigenetic repressors regulate gene expression in oligodendroglia lineage cells in the context of aging and disease.
Vivien Horváth was recruited to Umeå University as a Wallenberg Molecular Medicine Fellow in December 2025 and is currently an Assistant Professor and Wallenberg Fellow at the Department of Medical and Translational Biology.
In 2016 she was awarded a PhD Fellowship from the Spanish Government and obtained her PhD in Biomedicine in 2020 at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology/Spanish National Research Council (Barcelona, Spain). There she investigated how transposable elements (TEs) regulate gene expression under diverse environmental stress conditions using Drosophila as a model system. Her work demonstrated that TEs contribute to transcriptome complexity during stress, in part by providing functional transcription factor binding sites. During her PhD, she also completed a research stay at the Edmund Mach Foundation (Trento, Italy).
In November 2020, she joined Lund University/Lund Stem Cell Center (Lund, Sweden) as a postdoctoral researcher. She was awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Collaborative Center for X-Linked Dystonia-Parkinsonism (XDP), and her work focused on understanding the role of TEs in the development of age-related neurodegenerative disorders such as XDP. Her research, centered on neuronal cell types, showed that TEs have a strong impact on gene expression in both the healthy and diseased human brain, often through interactions with epigenetic repressors such as DNA methylation.
As a Wallenberg Molecular Medicine Fellow, her current work further explores these intricate dynamics between TEs and their epigenetic repressors. She aims to understand how they regulate gene expression in oligodendroglia lineage cells during aging and disease and develop TE-targeted epigenome editing approaches to mitigate their effect.