Marisa Merino

I am a Lecturer and Research Group Leader at the University of Liverpool. My research asks how tissues preserve order as they grow, repair damage, and eliminate unfit cells, and how these control systems become hijacked in disease. I work mainly with Drosophila, a powerful model for understanding how living tissues organise growth, cell death, and signalling in space.

I am fascinated by how living tissues maintain order while constantly changing, and this drives my interest in imaging-based approaches that let us see biology more directly and quantitatively. In this project, that comes together with a simple but important question: can healthy, wounded, and dying epithelial tissue be distinguished by label-free hyperspectral imaging?

I have a background in developmental biology, cell competition, imaging, and quantitative tissue analysis, and I have published work on cell fitness, cell death, and morphogen signalling. My goal here is to build a small but useful open reference dataset that others can use to compare results, calibrate new analyses, and develop future tools. I care about making resources that are both biologically rigorous and genuinely useful to other researchers.

June 2026