Friedrich Frischknecht PhD

Friedrich Frischknecht is a biochemist by training from the Free University of Berlin and did his Ph.D. with Michael Way at EMBL Heidelberg on the interaction of vaccinia virus with the cytoskeleton. During his Ph.D., he developed an interest in host-pathogen interactions and moved to the Pasteur Institute for a postdoc to study the migration of malaria parasites during transmission from mosquito to vertebrate. He has been 2005 a group leader and since 2014 a professor at Heidelberg University, where his laboratory aims at understanding how malaria parasites form and move. To this end, they use reverse genetic, microscopy, and biophysics approaches. He is vice chair of the DFG collaborative research center SFB 1129 (Integrative analysis of pathogen replication and spread), co-director of the Biology of Parasitism course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, and editor for Parasitology in Molecular Microbiology.