Clemens Plaschka promoted to Senior Group Leader
As of January, the IMP has a new member of its senior faculty: Clemens Plaschka was promoted to Senior Group Leader.
Faculty positions at the IMP are generally capped at eight years, but promotions to senior faculty are possible in instances of exceptional merit and promise. Clemens Plaschka, who started his lab at the IMP in 2015, joins these exceptions. Effective from January 2025, Plaschka is a senior group leader with a larger group and rolling tenure.
“I am excited that Clemens Plaschka will continue to build his career here at the IMP with a long-term vision,” said IMP Scientific Director Jan-Michael Peters. “The work of the Plaschka lab has provided fundamental insight into the mechanisms of gene expression and the lab is on track to make further groundbreaking discoveries. Beyond that, Clemens is a very valuable member of our community and committed to developing both the IMP and the Vienna BioCenter as a whole. I look forward to working with him in his new role as senior group leader.”
Clemens Plaschka and his lab have made key contributions to understanding RNA splicing and mRNA maturation, processes that are essential for gene expression. RNA splicing removes non-coding introns from mRNA transcripts, leaving coding exons to form mature mRNA. These mRNAs are then packaged by proteins into mRNA-protein complexes, for their subsequent transport from the nucleus to the cytoplasm for protein synthesis. In recent results, Plaschka’s lab has revealed how mRNAs are recognized and prepared for export, showing that they form compact globules before leaving the nucleus. These findings significantly advanced our knowledge of the final steps of nuclear gene expression. The lab has also uncovered details about spliceosome assembly, recycling, and disassembly, including a “multi-factor authentication” mechanism ensuring precise timing. These discoveries contributed to the reshaping of our understanding of mRNA maturation.
Born and raised in Vienna, Clemens Plaschka pursued his undergraduate studies at Imperial College in London. He then did his doctoral studies at the University of Munich and the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry with Patrick Cramer. At the Cramer lab, he focused on the structural mechanisms underlying gene activation. Plaschka later pursued postdoctoral research with Kiyoshi Nagai at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, where he advanced the understanding of RNA splicing by the spliceosome, a large molecular machine. In 2018, he joined the IMP as a Group Leader.
Clemens Plaschka’s early achievements include the Kulturpreis Bayern (2015) and Otto-Hahn Medal (2016) for his PhD work, and an EMBO Long-Term Fellowship during his postdoc (2016). Since starting his lab at the IMP in 2018, Plaschka was awarded an ERC Starting Grant in 2020, was selected as EMBO Young Investigator in 2022, and presented with the Eppendorf Award for Young Investigators in 2024.
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