Juergen A. Knoblich PhD

Dr. Jurgen Knoblich is Senior Scientist and Deputy Director at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (IMBA) in Vienna. He studies neural stem cells and the development of the nervous system in Drosophila and vertebrates. He identified key regulators of asymmetric stem cell division and demonstrated that mutations in genes controlling cell division drive tumor development in the brain. For his outstanding scientific achievements, he was awarded the Wittgenstein Prize (2009) and the Erwin Schroedinger Prize (2012). In 2010 Knoblich received an Advanced Research Grant of the European Research Council (ERC).

The biochemist received his Ph.D. at the Friedrich Miescher Laboratorium of the Max Planck Society, Tübingen, Germany. Following postdoctoral research at the University of California, San Francisco, he was promoted to the group leader at the Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna, Austria. In 2004, Knoblich became a senior scientist at the IMBA and one year later Deputy Director of this institution. Furthermore, he is a member of several scientific societies including the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO), the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Academia Europaea.