Patrick Cramer to give Max Birnstiel Lecture
For the next Max Birnstiel Lecture, the IMP will welcome the molecular biologist Patrick Cramer (Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen).
The Birnstiel Lecture series will feature a highly distinguished speaker: Patrick Cramer of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany. The lecture “Gene transcription: from mechanisms to regulation” will be given at the IMP lecture hall on 1 June 2022, at 11 a.m.
The lab of Patrick Cramer studies the molecular mechanisms of gene transcription using integrative structural biology and systems biology approaches. In the past, Cramer and his team analysed the structure and function of RNA polymerases. The long-term aim of Patrick Cramer is to bring together molecular and systems biology to understand the expression and regulation of the genome.
Patrick Cramer studied chemistry in Stuttgart, Heidelberg, Bristol, and Cambridge, followed by doctoral research at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Grenoble, France until 1998. From 1999 to 2001, Cramer was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University in the lab of Roger D. Kornberg, where he made key contributions to the work that led to Kornberg’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2006. In 2001, Patrick Cramer became professor of biochemistry at the Gene Center of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich (LMU), of which he was a director from 2004 to 2014. He was then appointed director at the MPI for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany.
In recognition of his research achievements, Patrick Cramer has been awarded accolades of prizes, including the Feldberg Foundation Prize in 2011, the Ernst-Jung Award for Medicine in 2009, and the Gottfried-Wilhelm-Leibniz Award of the German Research Foundation (DFG) in 2006. Patrick Cramer is an elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) and the German Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina).
Patrick Cramer will be hosted by the IMP’s Alexander Stark and Clemens Plaschka.