Stephan Wolfgang Grill ( born 5 May 1974 in Heidelberg [1] ) is a German biophysicist.
Stephan Wolfgang Grill ( born 5 May 1974 in Heidelberg [1] ) is a German biophysicist.
Grill studied physics at the University of Heidelberg. He then worked at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg with Anthony Hyman and Ernst Stelzer, which led to his PhD on The mechanics of asymmetric spindle positioning in the Caenorhabditis elegans embryo in 2002 (PhD officially awarded at TU Munich).
As a postdoctoral fellow, he worked at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden and with Carlos Bustamante at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of Berkeley as a Helen Hay Whitney Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow. As of 2006, he was a junior research group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics and at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden. In 2009, he held a deputy professorship at the Leipzig University, where he habilitated in 2013. Grill was Professor of Biophysics at the Biotechnology Center of the TU Dresden from 2013 to 2019. Since October 2018, he has been a Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society and Director at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden. [2]
From 2019 to 2021, Grill was the speaker of the Physics of Life Cluster of Excellence at the Technische Universität Dresden, [3] where he is also an honorary professor at the Faculty of Physics. [4]
Grill was one of the editors of the journal Physical Review Letters from 2014 to 2019. [5]
Physics of Life [6]
With his research group, Grill studies the mechanisms by which structure and form arises in living systems. In this context, he is interested in the role of mechanical processes in cell differentiation (meiosis in C. elegans such as the distribution of chromosomes during division via the formation of the spindle apparatus and division of cellular components via the contraction of a fine network of molecules similar to those in muscle) and their connection with molecular processes (e. e.g. given via chemical gradients). In this context, he developed a method of revealing mechanical stresses in the cell by selectively cutting through cellular structures with lasers (laser-assisted non-invasive cellular microsurgery). He already developed this method at EMBL. For the study of cell division, he used genetic engineering techniques to selectively stain parts of the cell's contractile network, making them visible and selectively severable for the laser. The degree of divergence after severing was a measure of the tension.
At Berkeley, he began his second field of research, the direct observation of molecules during the transcription of DNA into RNA. Here he was able to follow the movement of the RNA polymerase II responsible for this along the DNA strand, which not only moves in one direction but also jumps back and forth. This reflects control processes and correction processes during transcription that reduce the error rate.
In 2010, Grill received the EMBO Young Investigator Award. In 2011, he was awarded the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize for young scientists. [7] In 2015 Grill was awarded the Sackler Prize for Biophysics, and in 2017 he was elected to the European Molecular Biology Organization.
Howard Robert Horvitz ForMemRS NAS AAA&S APS NAM is an American biologist best known for his research on the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, for which he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, together with Sydney Brenner and John E. Sulston, whose "seminal discoveries concerning the genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death" were "important for medical research and have shed new light on the pathogenesis of many diseases".
The Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science is a formally independent non-governmental and non-profit association of German research institutes. Founded in 1911 as the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, it was renamed to the Max Planck Society in 1948 in honor of its former president, theoretical physicist Max Planck. The society is funded by the federal and state governments of Germany.
The Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry (MPIB) is a research institute of the Max Planck Society located in Martinsried, a suburb of Munich. The institute was founded in 1973 by the merger of three formerly independent institutes: the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, the Max Planck Institute of Protein and Leather Research, and the Max Planck Institute of Cell Chemistry.
The Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, also known as the Karl-Friedrich Bonhoeffer Institute, was a research institute of the Max Planck Society, located in Göttingen, Germany. On January 1, 2022, the institute merged with the Max Planck Institute for Experimental Medicine in Göttingen to form the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences.
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.
Peter Gruss is a German developmental biologist, president of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, and the former president of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft.
The Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) is a biology research institute located in Dresden, Germany. It was founded in 1998 and was fully operational in 2001. Research groups in the institute work in molecular biology, cell biology, developmental biology, biophysics, and systems biology supported by various facilities.
The Max Planck Institute of Biophysics is located in Frankfurt, Germany. It was founded as the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Biophysics in 1937, and moved into a new building in 2003. It is an institute of the Max Planck Society.
The Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Germany, is a facility of the Max Planck Society for basic medical research. Since its foundation, six Nobel Prize laureates worked at the Institute: Otto Fritz Meyerhof (Physiology), Richard Kuhn (Chemistry), Walther Bothe (Physics), André Michel Lwoff, Rudolf Mößbauer (Physics), Bert Sakmann and Stefan W. Hell (Chemistry).
The Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg, Germany is an interdisciplinary research institute that conducts basic research in modern immunobiology, developmental biology and epigenetics. It was founded in 1961 as the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and is one of 86 institutions of the Max Planck Society. Originally named the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology, it was renamed to its current name in 2010 as it widened its research thrusts to the study of epigenetics.
Franz-Ulrich Hartl is a German biochemist and the current Executive Director of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry. He is known for his pioneering work in chaperone-mediated protein folding.
Christoph Cremer is a German physicist and emeritus at the Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg, former honorary professor at the University of Mainz and was a former group leader at Institute of Molecular Biology (IMB) at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany, who has successfully overcome the conventional limit of resolution that applies to light based investigations by a range of different methods. In the meantime, according to his own statement, Christoph Cremer is a member of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research.
The Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize is an annual award bestowed by the Paul Ehrlich Foundation since 1952 for investigations in medicine. It carries a prize money of 120,000 Euro. The prize awarding ceremony is traditionally held on 14 March, the birthday of Nobel laureate Paul Ehrlich, in the St. Paul's Church, Frankfurt am Main.
The Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Biology of Ageing, founded in 2008, is one of over 80 independent, non-profit-making institutes set up under the umbrella of the Max Planck Society. The overall research aim is to obtain fundamental insights into the aging process and thus to pave the way towards healthier aging in humans. An international research team drawn from almost 30 nations is working to uncover underlying molecular, physiological and evolutionary mechanisms.
The Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex systems is one of the 80 institutes of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, located in Dresden, Germany.
Anthony Arie Hyman is a British scientist and director at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics.
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.
Kai Simons is a Finnish professor of biochemistry and cell biology and physician living and working in Germany. He introduced the concept of lipid rafts, as well as coined the term trans-Golgi network and proposed its role in protein and lipid sorting. The co-founder and co-organizer of EMBO, ELSO, Simons initiated the foundation of MPI-CBG, where he acted as a director (1998–2006) and a group-leader. He is the co-founder and co-owner of Lipotype GmbH.
Karen Oegema is a molecular cell biologist at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research and a professor of cellular and molecular medicine at the University of California, San Diego. She is best known for her research with Caenorhabditis elegans, which her lab uses as a model system in their mission to dissect the molecular mechanics of cytokinesis. She was given the Women in Cell Biology Mid-Career Award for Excellence in Research in 2017, as well as the Women in Cell Biology Junior Award for Excellence in Research in 2006.
Heather A. Harrington is an applied mathematician interested in dynamical systems, chemical reaction network theory, topological data analysis, and systems biology. Since 2020, she is professor of mathematics and Royal Society University Research Fellow at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, where she heads the Algebraic Systems Biology group. In 2023, she became a director at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, where she is also leading the interinstitutional Center for Systems Biology Dresden (CSBD) together with partners from the Technical University Dresden and the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems.
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