Fotis Constantine Kafatos was a Greek biologist. Between 2007-2010 he was the founding president of the European Research Council (ERC). He chaired the ERC Scientific Council from 2006-2010. Thereafter, he was appointed Honorary President of the ERC.
Patrick Cramer is a German chemist, structural biologist, and molecular systems biologist. In 2020, he was honoured to be an international member of the National Academy of Sciences. He became president of the Max Planck Society in June 2023.
Matthias Mann is a scientist in the area of mass spectrometry and proteomics.
Carlos Martínez Alonso, was born in Villasimpliz, in the province of León, on January 9, 1950. In 1974 he obtained a chemistry degree from the Universidad Complutense of Madrid. Four years later, in 1978, he obtained a Ph.D. in immunology by the same university. He was appointed President of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) from 2004 to 2008, and Secretary of State for Research in the Ministry of Science and Innovation from early 2008 to December 2009.
Matthias Werner Hentze is a German scientist. He is the director of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), co-director of the Molecular Medicine Partnership Unit between EMBL and Heidelberg University, and Professor of Molecular Medicine at Heidelberg University.
Giulio Superti-Furga is an Italian molecular and systems biologist based in Vienna, Austria. He is the Scientific Director of CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and Professor of Medical Systems Biology at the Medical University of Vienna.
The Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA) is an independent biomedical research organisation founded by the Austrian Academy of Sciences in cooperation with the pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim. The institute employs around 250 people from over 40 countries, who perform basic research. IMBA is located at the Vienna BioCenter (VBC) and shares facilities and scientific training programs with the Gregor Mendel Institute of Molecular Plant Biology (GMI) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP), the basic research center of Boehringer Ingelheim.
Christos Louis, nicknamed Kitsos, is a Greek Molecular Geneticist. He graduated from the Medical School of the University of Marburg in 1974 and joined the team of Prof. C.E. Sekeris, first at Marburg and then at the German Cancer Research Center Heidelberg, obtaining his doctoral degree in Cell biology from Heidelberg University in 1977. His work focuses on Genomics and Bioinformatics of insects and vector-borne/tropical diseases.
Susan M. Gasser is a Swiss molecular biologist. From 2004 to 2019 she was the director of the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel, Switzerland, where she also led a research group from 2004 until 2021. She was in parallel professor of molecular biology at the University of Basel until April 2021. Since January 2021, Susan Gasser is director of the ISREC Foundation, which supports translational cancer research. She is also professor invité at the University of Lausanne in the department of fundamental microbiology. She is an expert in quantitative biology and studies epigenetic inheritance and genome stability. Recipient of multiple swiss and European awards, she was named member of the US Academy of Sciences in 2022.
Andrea Ablasser is a German immunologist, who works as a full professor of Life Sciences at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Her research has focused on how the innate immune system is able to recognise virus-infected cells and pathogens.
Rohini Kuner is an Indian-born German pharmacologist and director of the Institute of Pharmacology at Heidelberg University.
Elisa Izaurralde was an Uruguayan biochemist and molecular biologist. She served as Director and Scientific Member of the Department of Biochemistry at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen from 2005 until her death in 2018. In 2008, she was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, shared with Elena Conti, for "fundamental new insights into intracellular RNA transport and RNA metabolism". Together with Conti, she helped characterize proteins important for exporting mRNA out of the nucleus and later in her career she helped elucidate mechanisms of mRNA silencing, translational repression, and mRNA decay.
Melina Schuh is a German biochemist and Director at the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences. She is known for her work on meiosis in mammalian oocytes, for her studies on the mechanisms leading to the age-related decline in female fertility, and for the development of the Trim-Away protein depletion method.
Asifa Akhtar is a Pakistani biologist who has made significant contributions to the field of chromosome regulation. She is Senior Group Leader and Director of the Department of Chromatin Regulation at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics. Akhtar was awarded EMBO membership in 2013. She became the first international and female Vice President of the Max Planck Society's Biology and Medicine Section in July 2020.
Daniel Wolfram Gerlich is a cell biologist. Since 2012 he has been a Senior Group Leader at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna.
Julius Brennecke is a German molecular biologist and geneticist. He is a Senior Group Leader at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology. (IMBA) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna.
Peter Scheiffele is a German neurobiologist who conducts research at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel, Switzerland.
Eileen E. M. Furlong is an Irish molecular biologist working in the fields of transcription, chromatin biology, developmental biology and genomics. She is known for her work in understanding how the genome is regulated, in particular to how developmental enhancers function, how they interact within three dimensional chromatin topologies and how they drive cell fate decisions during embryogenesis. She is Head of the Department of Genome Biology at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). Furlong was elected a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in 2013, the Academia Europaea in 2016 and to EMBO’s research council in 2018.
Yardena Samuels or Samuels-Lev is an Israeli molecular biologist who is the Director of the Ekard Institute for Cancer Diagnosis Research at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Her research considers the genetic mutations of melanoma.
Nitzan Rosenfeld is a professor of Cancer Diagnostics at the University of Cambridge. He is a Senior Group Leader at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute and co-founder of Inivata, a clinical cancer genomics company.
