Dr Niklas Grassl
Dr Niklas Grassl
Post-Doctorate Researcher of Cancer Research
Emanoel Lee Fellow
Niklas Grassl is an Early Career Research Fellow at St Cross College and a postdoctoral scientist at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, where he works in the laboratory of Professor Yang Shi.
He studied mathematics and physics at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich before turning to medicine, completing a doctorate on mass spectrometry-based proteomics with Professor Matthias Mann at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry. He trained in neurology at the Faculty of Medicine Mannheim, Heidelberg University, and is a German board-certified neurologist. From 2021 to 2025 he was a clinician scientist at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg, where he worked on immunotherapy for diffuse midline glioma. Throughout this period he taught neurology and neuro-oncology to medical students in Mannheim and supervised four medical doctoral students.
His research concerns diffuse midline glioma, a brain tumour of children and young adults for which there is currently no curative treatment. His work in Oxford is supported by The Brain Tumour Charity.
Research Projects
Epigenetic control of diffuse midline glioma. The H3K27M mutation changes how methylation of histone H3 at lysine 27 is deposited and read, holding tumour cells in an undifferentiated progenitor-like state. Using CRISPR Cas and single-cell sequencing, he asks which of the resulting chromatin dependencies these tumours actually rely on, and whether these dependencies that can be targeted therapeutically.
