SciCombinator

Emmanuelle Charpentier is a French microbiologist, geneticist and biochemist. She is a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, Honorary Professor at Humboldt University, Visiting Professor at Umeå University and recipient of an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship. Prior to her current appointments, she worked at several other institutions in Germany, Sweden, Austria, the US and France. Emmanuelle Charpentier’s research on a bacterial immune system laid the foundation for the ground-breaking CRISPR-Cas9 genome engineering technology. She has received numerous prestigious awards and distinctions, and is an elected member of several renowned academies of sciences. She is co-founder of CRISPR Therapeutics and ERS Genomics.

On page 650, the institutional affiliation of Dr. Werner J.D. Ouwendijk was incorrectly listed as Freie Universitaet Berlin. It should instead be Erasmus MC, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

Christian Behrends studied biology at the University of Konstanz in Germany, but did his Diploma thesis externally with Michael Ehrmann in the School of Bioscience at Cardiff University, UK. He then pursued his PhD degree in Franz-Ulrich Hartl’s group at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany. For his postdoctoral work Christian received a Feodor Lynen Research Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, with which he moved to the US and joined the laboratory of J. Wade Harper at Harvard Medical School. In 2011, he received an Emmy Noether Research Grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG) and started his own independent group at the Medical School of Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. He is also a recipient of an ERC starting grant. Research in Christian’s lab is focused on the basic mechanisms of autophagy, particularly concentrating on the role of ubiquitin signalling in autophagy, and the crosstalk between autophagy and other vesicular trafficking pathways.

Scratching the surface: For over 100 years the interactions of molecules at surfaces have been studied at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society, Berlin. Nobel Laureate Gerhard Ertl looks back at some of the key developments in this time, and the people who made them.