Juergen Knoblich

Juergen Knoblich started his scientific carreer as a graduate student at the Max Planck Institute in Tübingen. His Ph.D. thesis was on Genetic Analysis of Cyclin Proteins during Drosophila Embryonic Development and was supervised by Dr. Christian Lehner. After his Ph.D., Juergen Knoblich joined the laboratory of Drs. Yuh Nung and Lily Jan at the University of California, San Francisco as post doctoral fellow. During this time, he started to work on asymmetric cell division, a topic that has remained the main focus of his research ever since. In 1997, Juergen Knoblich returned to Europe to become a group leader at the Institute of Molecular Pathology (I.M.P.) in Vienna, Austria. In 2004, he moved next door to the newly founded Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (IMBA). He became a senior scientist and was appointed deputy scientific director of the institute in 2005.

Juergen Knoblich’s laboratory is interested in the molecular mechanisms of asymmetric cell division. They use the fruitfly Drosophila to understand how protein determinants can localize asymmetrically during mitosis and how the the mitotic spindle is oriented so that the determinants are inherited by only one of the two daughter cells. More recently, the lab began to focus on stem cell biology to understand, how stem cells restrict the ability to self-renew to only a few daughter cells while the other daughter cells become lineage committed and differentiate. They have characterized a gene family called the TRIM-NHL proteins that control self-renewal both in neuronal and ovarian Drosophila stem cells. Mutations in these genes cause the formation of stem cell derived tumors and therefore serve as a model system for cancer stem cells. Proteins in this family regulate the micro-RNA pathway and how they do this is a major focus of the lab. While Drosophila remains the major focus of the lab, Juergen Knoblich’s group has recently started to study stem cell biology in the mouse brain as well. They use in utero electroporation and transgenic mouse technology in order to transfer their results from flies to higher organisms.

Juergen Knoblich has received several awards such as the Anniversary Award of the Federation of the European Biochemical Societies (FEBS) in 2001, the Young Investigator Award of the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) in 2001 and the Early Career Award of the European Life Scientist Organization (ELSO) in 2003. Juergen Knoblich is a member of the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) since 2002 and has been elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) in 2002. Since 2005, he serves on the EMBO fellowship committee. Juergen Knoblich is also member of the editorial board of Current Biology since 2002 and the European Journal of Cell Biology since 2004.