Fabian Theis is director of the Institute of Computational Biology at the Helmholtz Center Munich and coordinates the Helmholtz Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Unit (HelmholtzAI) which was launched in 2019. He is full professor at the Technical University of Munich, holding the chair ‘Mathematical Modelling of Biological Systems’ and associate faculty at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. During his academic career Fabian Theis obtained MSc degrees in Mathematics and Physics at the University of Regensburg in 2000. He received a PhD degree in Physics from the same university in 2002 and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Granada in 2003. He worked as visiting researcher at the department of Architecture and Computer Technology (University of Granada, Spain), at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute (Wako, Japan), at FAMU-FSU (Florida State University, USA) and at TUAT’s Laboratory for Signal and Image Processing (Tokyo, Japan), and headed the ‘signal processing & information theory’ group at the Institute of Biophysics (Regensburg, Germany). In 2006, he started working as Bernstein fellow leading a junior research group at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, located at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organisation at Göttingen. In summer 2007, Fabian Theis became working group head of CMB at the Institute of Bioinformatics at the Helmholtz Center Munich. In spring 2009, he became associate Professor for Mathematics in Systems Biology at the Math Department of the TU Munich. 2009-2014 he was member of the ‘Young Academy’ (founded by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina)and was awarded an ERC starting grant in 2010.
In 2017 he was awarded the Erwin Schrödinger prize together within an interdisciplinary team at the ETH Zürich. Fabian Theis is part of and also coordinates various consortia (i.e. sparse2big involving 8 Helmholtz Centers) and founded the network SingleCellOmics Germany (SCOG). Furthermore he coordinates the 2019 launched Munich School for Data Science (MUDS).
Prof. Michael Sattler is Director of the Institute of Structural Biology at HMGU and Chair for Biomolecular NMR Spectroscopy at the Technische Universität München (TUM) since 2007. He has been trained in the development of methods for biomolecular NMR spectroscopy with C. Griesinger during my doctoral studies at University of Frankfurt, and in structural biology as a postdoc working with Dr. Stephen W. Fesik at Abbott Laboratories (Illinois, USA). At Abbott he performed structural studies of biomedically important proteins in cellular signaling and apoptosis: Shc-PTB/Trk (Nature 1995), Bcl-xL (Nature 1996;Science 1997). During this time the Fesik lab developed the SAR by NMR approach for structure-based drug design. As a group leader at EMBL (1997-2006) Michael Sattler established a research programme on structural biology in RNA-based gene regulation: pre-mRNA splicing (Science 2001, 2006), RNAi (Argonaute PAZ domain, Nature 2003) and cellular signalling and started to investigate molecular mechanisms of peroxisome biogenesis.
The Sattler lab develops and applies solution state NMR methods for studies of large protein complexes. Research topics focus on structural analysis of RNA-based gene regulation (Nature 2011, Nature Struct Mol Biol 2014; Nature 2014), i.e. protein-RNA and protein-protein interactions in the regulation of alternative splicing and mRNA metabolism and their link with human disease-related pathways. In collaborations with researchers at TUM and HMGU the group studies molecular mechansims of protein chaperones, including efforts towards the development of small molecule inhibitors (i.e. Hsp90: Mol Cell 2014; Nature Medicine 2015). He develops and applies integrated structural biology approaches combining NMR, crystallography and small angle X-ray or neutron scattering (SAXS/SANS) to investigate the structure and especially dynamics of protein complexes in gene regulation and other important cellular pathways (Method Enzym 2015). The Sattler group has established a research programme on structure-based-drug discovery at the Institute of Structural Biology at HMGU. State-of-the-art facilities are available for ultra-high-field NMR (http://www.bnmrz.org), fragment-based screening (600 MHz NMR), crystallization, in-house SAXS, protein expression & purification, as well as medicinal chemistry. Regular access is available to synchrotron beamlines for crystallography and SAX