Juan Manuel García-Arcos joins EPFL as Ambizione Fellow
© 2026 EPFL
Juan Manuel García-Arcos has joined EPFL’s School of Life Sciences as an SNSF Ambizione Fellow, where he will carry out an independent research project hosted in the lab of Professor Pierre Gönczy.
The SNSF Ambizione grants are aimed at early career researchers from Switzerland and abroad “who wish to conduct, manage and lead an independent project at a Swiss higher education institution.”
“The Ambizione fellowship is a key step toward my scientific independence,” says Juan Manuel García-Arcos. “It gives me the freedom to develop new approaches, build a small team, and take risks on ideas that sit between disciplines. EPFL is unique in this aspect because it gives me access to both cutting-edge microengineering and cancer biology infrastructure within a hundred meters!”
His project, Molecular and Physical Basis of Cell Fragmentation, aims to understand how and why cells break apart, using quantitative and mechanistic approaches at the interface of physics and cell biology. By drawing on expertise from cell biology and microengineering, the work aims to shed new light on fundamental cellular processes, including those studied in disease-related contexts.
To pursue his research, García-Arcos set up The Cell Dynamics and Fragmentation Lab in 2025, hosted in the lab of Professor Pierre Gönczy.