Profiles of Leading Women Scientists on AcademiaNet.
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Year of election: | 2018 |
Section: | Genetics/Molecular Biology and Cell Biology |
City: | Heidelberg |
Country: | Germany |
Jan Ellenberg is distinguished for many contributions to the cell biology and imaging field. The majority of these were made at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) where he is Senior Scientist and Head of the Cell Biology and Biophysics Unit. His major research contributions cover several aspects of the cell division cycle and nuclear organization, including systematic analysis of mitosis, nuclear pore complex structure and assembly, as well as chromatin organization and formation and segregation of mitotic and meiotic chromosomes.
His goal has been to obtain structural and functional measures of the required molecular machinery inside cells using quantitative 4D imaging, single molecule spectroscopy, as well as light sheet and super-resolution microscopy, which his group is constantly developing and automating to address all molecular components comprehensively.
His research group played a key role in large EU-wide efforts on systems biology of mitosis, as well as microscopy automation and unbiased computational image analysis, (www.mitocheck.org, www.mitosys.org, www.systemsmicroscopy.eu), establishing methods to reliably score up to billions of cells and capture rare and transient functional states automatically.
He is a member of several editorial, as well as scientific advisory boards of renowned international journals and research institutes. Due to the important role of new imaging technologies for the future life sciences, he has coordinated European efforts to make imaging technologies more accessible to researchers as open access research infrastructures (www.eurobioimaging.eu).