Type | public |
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Established | November 1, 2006 |
Endowment | EUR 45 million |
Provost | Thomas Carell (speaker of the board) |
Director | Oliver Baron (CEO) |
Administrative staff | ca. 800 |
Location | , , |
Website | www.cipsm.de |
The Center for Integrated Protein Science Munich (CIPSM) is a cluster of excellence in sciences located in Munich. It is an association of research groups of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, the Technical University of Munich, the Helmholtz Center Munich, and the Max Planck Institutes of biochemistry and neurobiology in Martinsried. Research at the center expands from isolated proteins up to proteins in living organisms applying methods of biophysics, biochemistry, medicine, and biology.
Proteins are as biological macromolecules a cornerstone of life. However, their functional importance and structural effects are not yet fully understood in every detail. Investigation of isolated proteins up to living organisms (e.g. zebra fish, Drosophilidae , Caenorhabditis elegans or escherichia coli bacteries), especially with regard to interactions, structural complexities (e.g. protein folding, structures of protein complexes, interactions between proteins and nucleic acids, and manipulation of protein functions) and neuro-degenerative diseases, promises to furnish basic knowledge of these macromolecules. This very knowledge could contribute to advances in biomedicine and biotechnologies.
The cluster is divided into six main areas of research.
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Each research area (A-F) is being represented by two coordinators who, in cooperation with the executive board, decide on the appointment of new professorships and elect the executive board of four researchers and one member responsible for family and gender support. The main responsibilities of the board members are research, teaching and support of junior academic staff. The board members represent the interests of the cluster towards the directorate of the respective university. The speaker of the board and his deputy take special care of the supervision and recruitment of junior professorships. Research group leaders (principal and associate investigators) meet annually to decide on budget allocation. Leading the research group still is the individual task of the research group leader at own responsibility. Regular meetings between group leaders and coordinators ensure efficient guidance of the cluster. The speaker represents the cluster and thus negotiates with the universities participating in the cluster of excellence on matters like teaching as well as on financial and personal issues. Administration and supervision of financial endorsements of each fiscal year, personal recruitment, management of all cluster issues, procurement of larger tools, and organizing activities such as symposia, conferences and workshops (see Events and Conferences) are part of the job of the cluster CEO, who further takes care of applications and publicity work.
Female scientists of CIPSM are supported by a program called AFF (Ausschuss für Familien- und Frauenförderung; committee for family and gender support). The program was created to get more researchers with children and habilitated females into professorships or leading positions. The committee is being led by a member of the board who is especially responsible for family and gender support. The support program is intended to counter barriers in the academic career resulting from parental leave. For this purpose, junior researchers with child or children can be allocated a technical assistant for support of their research. Furthermore, a domestic aid can be granted on request. For researchers' children up to the age of three years, CIPSM runs its own day nursery. Additionally, a mentoring program was created to support successful employment of female scientists and symposia with high ranking female scientists should give researchers opportunities to obtain insight into careers, gain experiences and enhance scientific interaction.
Financial endorsements of CIPSM are provided by the Federal Republic of Germany, the states of Germany and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in the course of the German Universities Excellence Initiative and distributed orientated on demand.
Individual financial support of scientists of the cluster includes project-related funding of PhD and Postdoc positions, procurement of larger tools, financial support of events and conferences, and gender support.
The CIPSM cluster has been elected landmark in the German "country of ideas" initiative [1] honoring the achievements of CIPSM researchers, who have been awarded several prizes for their work conducted with CIPSM:
Furthermore, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research supports the cooperation "experimental and theoretical methods for dissecting the dynamics of epigenetic gene silencing in living cells" between the CIPSM groups Leonhardt and Schotta and the University of Heidelberg.
Furthermore, the CIPSM cluster organized
The project Science Comment [20] has been established in 2009 to comment objectively on and to discuss publications in well reputed scientific journals of chemistry, biology, pharmacy and medicine. This internet forum was intended to facilitate international communication of research results. The registered user can, referring to a certain publication, criticise or discuss this publication in public. Science Comment serves its purpose as data base for the quality assessment of a publicized result prior to its application. The possibility to check the feasibility of the result saves the users' time and resources.
The Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich is a public research university in Munich, Bavaria, Germany. Originally established as the University of Ingolstadt in 1472 by Duke Ludwig IX of Bavaria-Landshut, it is Germany's sixth-oldest university in continuous operation.
Bert Sakmann is a German cell physiologist. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Erwin Neher in 1991 for their work on "the function of single ion channels in cells," and the invention of the patch clamp. Bert Sakmann was Professor at Heidelberg University and is an Emeritus Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Germany. Since 2008 he leads an emeritus research group at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology.
Hartmut Michel is a German biochemist, who received the 1988 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for determination of the first crystal structure of an integral membrane protein, a membrane-bound complex of proteins and co-factors that is essential to photosynthesis.
Dieter Lüst is a German physicist, full professor for mathematical physics at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich since 2004 and a director of the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich. His research focusses on string theory. In 2000, he received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which is the highest honour awarded in German research.
Dieter Fenske is a German inorganic chemist.
Theodor Wolfgang Hänsch is a German physicist. He received one-third of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics for "contributions to the development of laser-based precision spectroscopy, including the optical frequency comb technique", sharing the prize with John L. Hall and Roy J. Glauber.
The Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, or Leibniz Prize, is awarded by the German Research Foundation to "exceptional scientists and academics for their outstanding achievements in the field of research". Since 1986, up to ten prizes have been awarded annually to individuals or research groups working at a research institution in Germany or at a German research institution abroad. It is considered the most important research award in Germany.
Thomas Carell is a German biochemist.
Matthias Mann is a German physicist and biochemist. He is doing research in the area of mass spectrometry and proteomics.
Peter Becker is a German molecular biologist. He studied biology at the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg until 1984 and finished his Ph.D at the German Cancer Research Center and the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg in 1987. After being employed at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) from 1991 until 1999 he became head of the Adolf Butenandt Institute for molecular biology at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. In 2000 he was elected as a member of EMBO.
Günter Matthias Ziegler is a German mathematician who has been serving as president of the Free University of Berlin since 2018. Ziegler is known for his research in discrete mathematics and geometry, and particularly on the combinatorics of polytopes.
Stefanie Dimmeler is a German biologist specializing in the pathophysiological processes underlying cardiovascular diseases. Her awards and honours include the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation for her work on the programmed cell death of endothelial cells. Since 2008 she has led the Institute for Cardiovascular Regeneration at the University of Frankfurt. Her current work is focusing to develop cellular and pharmacological strategies to improve cardiovascular repair and regeneration. Her work aims to establish non-coding RNAs as novel therapeutic targets.
Gunther Hartmann is a German immunologist and clinical pharmacologist. Since 2007 he has been the Director of the Institute of Clinical Chemistry and Clinical Pharmacology at the University Hospital of the University of Bonn.
Ilme Schlichting is a German biophysicist.
Petra Schwille is a German professor and a researcher in the area of biophysics. Since 2011, she has been a director of the Department of Cellular and Molecular Biophysics at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany. She is known for her ground-laying work in the field of fluorescence cross-correlation spectroscopy, and numerous contributions on model membranes. Her current research focuses around bottom-up approaches to building an artificial cell within a broader area of synthetic biology. In 2010, Schwille received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize.
Michèle Tertilt is a German professor of economics at the University of Mannheim. Before, Tertilt was an assistant professor at Stanford University. She also spent a year at the University of Pennsylvania and one year as a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. She is currently a director of the Review of Economic Studies and associate editor of the Journal of Development Economics.
Joachim Küpper is a professor of romance studies and comparative literature at the Freie Universität Berlin. Küpper has published on authors from various periods, including Homer, Dante, Petrarch, Shakespeare, Francisco de Quevedo, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Vega, Alessandro Manzoni, Balzac, Flaubert, Theodor Fontane, and Alain Robbe-Grillet. In addition, he works on problems of literary theory and intellectual history. He is the author of eight monographs and approximately 100 articles, as well as the editor of numerous volumes and scholarly journals.
Jürgen Rödel is a German materials scientist and professor of non-metallic inorganic materials at the Technische Universität Darmstadt.
Rupert Huber is a German physicist and university professor. Huber is known for his research in terahertz technology and semiconductor physics.
Wolfgang Anton Herrmann is a German chemist and academic administrator. From 1995 to 2019, he was President of the Technical University of Munich.