French, young and brilliant, Emmanuelle Charpentier will now be working as a director at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin!
Emmanuelle Charpentier is labeled one of the most influential scientists by the Time magazine when she discovered THE new technology of the century: CRISPR-Cas9. Among numerous honors, she won the $3M Breakthrough Prizes in Life Sciences, that she shared with Jennifer Doudna from Berkeley. Since 2012, Germany’s science community benefits from the high-flying scientist. Charpentier led a department of the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research in Braunschweig and was a professor at Hannover Medical School. Simultaneously, she was head of a research group at the Laboratory for Molecular Infection Medicine Sweden in Umea, where she discovered the CRISPR-Cas9 system – what an all-rounder!
Jennifer A. Doudna (left) and Emmanuelle Charpentier (right) win the Breakthrough Prize. Image: © STEPHEN LAM/Reuters/CorbisFrom 1. October 2015 on, her full-time capacity will flow into the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, where Charpentier becomes a new director. The French molecular biologist will apply her expertise to set up a new department at the institute, that will explore the regulatory processes in bacterial infectious diseases.
The Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin.The prestigious institute, which is closely knit with Berlin’s Charité, receives a strong figure at its side to reinforce its achievements in the ever-growing field of microbiology. That Charpentier remains in Germany is another demonstration of the splendid verve that the European biotech scene saw in the last decade.