Maria Leptin PhD

Maria Leptin received her PhD in 1983 for work on B cell activation carried out at the Basel Institute for Immunology under the supervision of Fritz Melchers. She switched to the study of development in Drosophila when she joined the laboratory of Michael Wilcox at the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, UK, for her postdoctoral work on Drosophila integrins. After a research visit at the lab of Pat O’Farrell at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), where she began studying gastrulation, she spent the years from 1989 to 1994 as a group leader at the Max Planck Institute in Tubingen. In 1994, she became Professor at the Institute of Genetics University of Cologne.