Carmen Birchmeier-kohler PhD

Carmen Birchmeier-Kohler was born on July 6, 1955, in Waldshut near the border to Switzerland. From 1974 to 1979 she studied chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Konstanz, the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. After completing her doctorate in 1984 under the supervision of the molecular biologist Professor Max Birnstiel at the University of Zurich, she became a postdoc at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) on Long Island, New York, in the laboratory of the geneticist Professor Michael Wigler, a pioneer in oncogene research. In Cold Spring Harbor she discovered two of these genes that give rise to cancer when mutated. Professor Wigler came to Berlin to the birthday symposium and gave a lecture on methods for the early detection of DNA mutations that can lead to cancer and autism.

After only two years as a postdoc, Carmen Birchmeier-Kohler was appointed staff scientist at CSH, and three years later, in 1989, she became head of an independent young investigator group at the Max Delbrück Laboratory of the Max Planck Society in Cologne. In 1993 she received an offer to come to the newly founded MDC, and in 1995, 20 years ago, she came to Berlin-Buch as a research group leader. Since 2002 she has also been a full professor at the Medical Faculty of Freie Universität (FU) Berlin, now Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin. In addition, she is a board member of the NeuroCure Cluster of Excellence, which was established at the Charité and focuses on neurosciences. It is funded within the framework of the Excellence Initiative by the federal and state governments. Professor Birchmeier-Kohler is also a deputy speaker of the Collaborative Research Center (SFB) 665 on developmental disturbances in the nervous system. In addition to the Leibniz Prize in 2002, in 1989 Professor Birchmeier-Kohler received the Bennigsen Prize of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia. In 2002 she was elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) and in 2012 member of the Academia Europaea.