Frank Johannes PhD

Frank Johannes (b. 1976) conducts research in the area of population epigenetics and epigenomics. His group combines bioinformatics and statistical genetic approaches with high-throughput molecular data to characterize patterns of epigenetic variation in populations of plants. The goal is to understand how this variation arises, how stable it is across generations, and to what extent it determines agriculturally and evolutionarily relevant plant traits. The ultimate goal is to be able to exploit engineered or naturally occurring epimutations for the improvement of commercial crops.

Johannes obtained his Ph.D. at Pennsylvania State University (USA) focusing on statistical genetics. He spent the last year of his Ph.D. as a Marie Curie Fellow at the French Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) where he was involved in one of the first population epigenetic studies in plants. He continued this work as a postdoc at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and later at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. He stayed in Groningen as an assistant professor before being appointed Rudolf Mößbauer Professor at TUM.