Simon Elsässer

Cell biology

How can the thousands of billions of cells in the human body remember what they are supposed to do and who they are? This is a question being asked by the biochemist Simon Elsässer. Epigenetics is one of his research fields and he investigates how our genetic information is registered in every single cell so that it remembers the stimuli and disturbances caused by other cells or the outside world. To explore this, he studies the fundamental biochemical processes, not in isolation but in their natural environment: the living cell itself.

Elsässer developed an innovative method in synthetic biology that facilitates precise quantitative measurements in the natural cell environment. This allows researchers to observe the behaviour of selected groups of proteins over an extended period. Key to this method are new tools with which proteins can be specifically modified. This makes it possible to study how their behaviour changes when the dynamics of proteins in the cell are influenced under controlled conditions.

The University of Freiburg wants to harness Elsässer’s outstanding research to reinforce and expand its research focus on “Signals of Life.” His pioneering work should trigger a leap in technology and significantly drive the university’s internationally competitive research activities and is supposed to play a central role in the cluster of excellence Centre for Integrative Biological Signalling Studies (CIBSS) and the Centre for Biological Signalling Studies (BIOSS).

Brief bio

Simon Elsässer is an associate professor at the Karolinska Institutet in Solna, Sweden, which he joined as a group leader funded by the Science for Life Laboratory Fellows Programme in 2015. Having completed his doctorate at Rockefeller University, New York, United States, in 2012, he became a postdoc in Cambridge, United Kingdom. He has been awarded numerous prizes and fellowships including Sweden’s Svedberg Prize, the College for Life Science Fellowship from the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the Wallenberg Academy Fellowship and the Future Research Leader Fellowship granted by the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research. He has also been awarded an ERC Starting Grant and an ERC Consolidator Grant.

Simon Elsässer has been selected for a Humboldt Professorship and is currently conducting appointment negotiations with the German university that nominated him for the award. If the negotiations end successfully, the award will be granted in 2026.