CV

Download PDF

Bence Kövér (last updated 2026-06-30)       

Details

Current address: SE16 7EE Phone: UK: +44 7551081905 Languages: Hungarian (Native), English (Professional)
Email: Bence.Kover@kcl.ac.uk LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/bencekover Github: https://github.com/BKover99

Introduction

I was born in Hungary and moved to the UK in 2019 to study biology and pursue a career as a research scientist. I graduated from University College London with a First-class honours MSci degree in Cell Biology, which also included a year abroad at California Institute of Technology. During my degree, I participated in various research projects which heavily relied on experimental and computational genetics. Through these projects, I gained experience in working with various model systems, including Drosophila, human cell lines, and fission yeast. In my PhD project at King’s College London, my goal is to build a complete understanding of the intrinsic and extrinsic factors that drive cell fate decisions in the pituitary gland. I work with data from mouse models and human patient samples, with a focus on computational approaches.

Education

  • King’s College London/Wellcome Trust: PhD Advanced Therapies for Regenerative Medicine        2023-2027
  • California Institute of Technology (Caltech): Third year / Year abroad      2021-2022

The only student chosen from UCL to study abroad at Caltech

Third year – GPA: 4.0 –  2 A+, 7 A, and 1 B+

  • University College London (UCL): Msci Cell Biology      2019-2023
  • Fourth year –  Received a First in all modules, with an average of 80.1%

Second year –  Received a First in all modules, with an average of 80.1%

First year –  Received a First in all modules, with an average of 81%

  • ELTE Radnoti Miklos High School (Budapest)                 2012-2019

School leaving exams (Matura/Erettsegi) –  5 (excellent grade) in all six subjects:

Advanced Biology, Advanced Chemistry, Mathematics, Hungarian Grammar and Literature, History, English

Experience

KCL CCRB, Andoniadou Lab, PhD student, 2024 July – present

  • PhD project titled “Cell fate decisions in the anterior pituitary gland”.
  • Supervised three students: Ian Kruk (Lister summer studentship), Georgia Goddard (MSc Applied Bioinf.), Alp Dogan (visitor)
  • Written several primary research papers and reviews on the pituitary gland and endocrine tumours
  • Developed the electronic pituitary omics (epitome) resource – https://epitome-atlas.com/

KCL Hub for Applied Bioinformatics, PhD Rotation student, 2024 April – June

  • Developed Pseudovisium, a software for rapid and memory-efficient processing of high-resolution spatial transcriptomic data.

KCL CGTRM, Spagnoli lab, PhD Rotation student, 2023 September – January

  • Mapped tissue heterogeneity at unprecedented scale by integrating newly acquired spatial transcriptomic data with scRNA-seq data from various stages in human embryonic development.
  • Performed human-mouse cross-species comparison in various aspects of pancreas development.

UCL IHA, Bähler lab, Master’s student, 2022 September – 2023 September

  • Master’s project on the “Genetic and Environmental Determinants of Multicellular-like Phenotypes (MLP) in Fission Yeast”.
  • Designed high-throughput assays, performed quantitative trait locus (QTL) analysis, applied various genetic-engineering tools, and screened a genome-wide deletion library.

UCL, Duchen lab, Research student, 2022 June – October

  • Summer project on the role of ATPIF1 in mitochondrial pathologies and healthy tissues. Computational and wet-lab.

Caltech, Hay lab, Research student, 2021 October – 2022 June

  • Studied how genetic modulation of mitochondrial quality control pathways affects heteroplasmy (% mutant mitochondria) in Drosophila. Primarily wet-lab.

Caltech, Junior exchange student, 2021 September –2022 June

  • Gained experience in modelling from first principles, frequentist and Bayesian statistics, and analysis of scRNA-seq data.

UCL IHA, Alic lab, Summer student, 2021 June –August

  • Studied the mechanism by which FOXO transcription factors affect lifespan in Drosophila. Computational and wet-lab.

University College London (UCL), student, 2019-2023

UCL Accommodation Ambassador/Campus Ambassador, part-time, 2020 August – 2021 March and 2022 August – October

  • Represented UCL professionally in all dealings with students, parents and staff. Helped in the reorganization of campus to align with COVID-policies.

Awards

Postgraduate Research Colleague of the Year (2026)

  • Awarded based on nominations from peers, representing positive contributions to research culture in the faculty.

British Society for Developmental Biology (BSDB) and The Company of Biologists travel grant – 1000£ funding (2025)

  • Funding towards my attendance and poster presentation at the 2025 Single Cell Analyses meeting held at CSHL.

Londonomics meeting (Francis Crick Institute) – Best talk – 100£ prize (2025)

  • Talk titled “Generating a Consensus Pituitary Atlas”.

Royal Society of Biology Top Student award – Affiliate membership (2023)

  • Awarded to the top-performing graduate in Biological Sciences.

Lillian Clarke prize (2023)

  • Awarded to the top-performing fourth-year MSci student in Biological Sciences.

Physiological Society: Research Springboard Studentship – 2000£ funding (2022)

  • Funding for my 2022 summer project in the Duchen lab.

Turing scheme grant – 4000£ funding (2022)

  • Funding from the UK government for my year abroad at Caltech.

GEE Harold & Olga Fox Fund – 1200£ funding (2021)

  • Funding for my 2021 summer project in the Alic lab.

Dean’s list (2021)

  • Recognises outstanding academic performance within the Faculty of Life Sciences at UCL.

Jackson Lewis scholarship (2021)

  • Recognises outstanding academic performance in one year of study.

Huxley prize (2021)

  • Awarded to the top-performing second-year MSci student in Biological Sciences.

Others: Basic Science Meeting Grant for ECE 2026 (400€), scverse travel grant to attend Berlin hackathon (500€)

Publications

Kövér B , Willis TL , Sherwin O , et al. Consensus pituitary atlas, a scalable resource for annotation, novel marker discovery, and analyses in pituitary gland research. Cell Rep 2026 45 117407. (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2026.117407)

  • Conceptualisation, Experiments, Analysis, Writing, Revisions

Kaufman-Cook, J., Kövér, B., & Andoniadou, C. L. (2026). The role of stem cells in pituitary tumour formation. Endocrine-Related Cancer, 33(6), Article e260171, e260171. Retrieved Jun 30, 2026, from https://doi.org/10.1530/ERC-26-0171

  • Writing, Illustrations, Revisions

Kövér, B., Kaufman-Cook, J., Sherwin, O., Vazquez Segoviano, M., Kemkem, Y., Lu, H.-C., and Andoniadou, C. L. (2025) Electronic Pituitary Omics (epitome) platform. 10.5281/zenodo.17154161

  • Resource generation, Curation, Software

Kemkem, Y., Quinn, M., Kövér, B., Santambrogio, A., Kaufman-Cook, J., Sherwin, O., Scriba, L. D., Brempou, D., Segoviano, M. V., Cameron, D., Berger, I., Ng, W., Nonaka, D., Theodoropoulou, M., Pamporaki, C., Carroll, P. V., Izatt, L., Chapple, J. P., Bornstein, S. R., Bechmann, N., Steenblock, C., Oakey, R. J., & Andoniadou, C. L. (2026). Phaeochromocytomas and paragangliomas harbour tumour-initiating SOX2+ stem cells. Endocrine-Related Cancer, 33(5), Article e250242, e250242. Retrieved Jun 30, 2026, from https://doi.org/10.1530/ERC-25-0242

  • Curation, Analysis, Writing, Revisions

Santambrogio, A., Kemkem, Y., Willis, T. L., Berger, I., Kastriti, M. E., Faure, L., Russell, J. P., Lodge, E. J., Yianni, V., Kövér, B., Oakey, R. J., Altieri, B., Bornstein, S. R., Steenblock, C., Adameyko, I., and Andoniadou, C. L. (2025) SOX2+ sustentacular cells are stem cells of the postnatal adrenal medulla. Nat. Commun. 16, 16

  • Analysis, Writing, Revisions

Bence Kӧvér, Alessandra Vigilante; Rapid and memory-efficient analysis and quality control of large spatial transcriptomics datasets; bioRxiv 2024.07.23.604776; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.07.23.604776

  • Conceptualisation, Analysis, Writing

Bence Kӧvér, Céleste E Cohen, Ladislav Seres, Saniya Raut, Markus Ralser, Benjamin M Heineike, Jürg Bähler, Genetic and environmental determinants of multicellular-like phenotypes in fission yeast, Genetics, Volume 233, Issue 1, May 2026, iyag064, https://doi.org/10.1093/genetics/iyag064

  • Conceptualisation, Experiments, Analysis, Writing, Revisions

Talks / Conferences / Events

2027: Invited speaker (SfE BES in Harrogate, the UK’s largest endocrinology conference)

2026: Talk (European Congress of Endocrinology, Prague), Participant (scverse proteomics hackathon, Berlin, Max Delbrück Centre for Molecular Medicine), Talk (Hub for Applied Bioinformatics, KCL), Talk (Bioinformatics study group, KCL)

2025: Flash talk and poster (Single Cell Analyses, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory), Talk (Londonomics), Poster (European Congress of Endocrinology, Prague)

2023: Talk (UCL Genetics Society)