PEOPLE

We're always on the look for motivated students and scientists!

Prof. Markus Ralser

Markus comes from Italy and is Director of the Institute for Biochemistry at the Charité and leader of the Biochemistry and Systems Biology of Metabolism Group. He is known for his discoveries regarding the coordination of dynamics within the cellular metabolic network and the development of analytical methods to tackle complex biological questions. In particular, results obtained by Markus' research group have provided fundamental insights into central carbon and amino acid metabolism, e.g. the evolutionary origion of carbohydrate metabolism, the metabolic oxidative stress response or the application of self-establishing yeast communities to study nutrient sharing.

Dr Alejandra Esparza-Mora

Alejandra is a postdoctoral fellow and comes from Colombia. Her research focuses on studying bacterial-fungal interactions: Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Candida albicans pathogenicity during polymicrobial infection of Galleria mellonella larvae.

Dr Benjamin Heineike

Ben is a postdoctoral fellow and comes from the USA. He's also a visiting scientist in Jurg Bahler's lab at University College London. He's interested in metabolic heterogeneity in yeast and in yeast evolution.

Fatma Amari

Fatma is a postdoctoral fellow and comes from France.

Dr Federica Agostini

Federica is a postdoctoral fellow and comes from Italy. She is interested in microbial communities and molecular responses to environmental change. At Charité she is also very much involved with teaching biochemistry to medical students.

Dr Johannes Hartl

Johannes is a postdoctoral fellow and comes from Austria. His research focuses on metabolic principles and adaptations in microbes, and their potential in limiting microbial growth. His work has a strong methodological focus, and he employs mass-spectrometry-based quantification of metabolites and proteins coupled with phenotypic screens. Beyond microbes, he works on biomarker discovery for infectious diseases from human plasma and their translation into clinical assays. Before joining Charité, he studied molecular biology at the University of Vienna, followed by a PhD in microbial metabolism at ETH Zürich.

Dr Julia Muenzner

Julia is a postdoctoral fellow and comes from Germany. She's using large-scale proteomics to study aneuploidy in yeasts. Before coming to Charité, she did her PhD in structural virology with Stephen Graham at the University of Cambridge, UK, studying protein-protein interactions between viruses and host cells.

Dr Lisa Juliane Kahl

Lisa is a postdoctoral fellow and comes from Germany. She completed her PhD at Columbia University, where she investigated how environmental stimuli influence the respiratory and metabolic balance and biofilm formation of the opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Lisa joined the Ralser lab in 2020 to explore how metabolic plasticity advances antimicrobial tolerance in critical bacterial pathogens. Lisa is fascinated by the metabolic diversity in microbes and how microbes communicate through metabolic cooperation. In collaboration with Craig MacLean's and Rachel Wheatley's groups at Oxford University, Lisa investigates cross-species interactions of bacterial-fungal co-infections and their contribution to antimicrobial resistance.

Dr Ludwig Sinn

Ludwig is a postdoctoral fellow and comes from Germany. He joined the Ralser lab in 2022 and did his PhD at Technische Universität Berlin.

Dr Lukasz Szyrwiel

Lukasz is a postdoctoral fellow and comes from Poland. Before joining Markus's group he workedg as an analytical chemist at CRNS (France), RIKEN (Japan), DESY and European EXFEL (Germany), and Francis Crick Institute (UK). His passions are mass spectrometers and their application in understanding homeostasis in physiological and pathological processes. He says "we are the luckiest scientists by living in times of tremendous progress in the development of MS technologies and having the opportunity to apply them in live science" and he invests his entire energy in keeping the lab's MS platform at its highest performance.

Dr Nana-Maria Grüning

Nana is a postdoctoral fellow and comes from Germany. She has her scientific roots in yeast metabolism, molecular genetics and enzyme kinetics. After working in human genetics, she returned to the Ralser lab to teach biochemistry to medical students and support the group in scientific writing.

Dr Nir Cohen

Nir is a postdoctoral fellow and comes from Israel.

Dr Oliver Lemke

Oliver is a postdoctoral fellow and comes from Germany. He did his doctoral degree at the FU Berlin focusing on protein-based molecular dynamics simulations, clustering and docking. He is currently working as a data scientist and bioinformatician on several yeast proteomic and clinical plasma proteomic datasets.

Dr Pauline Trébulle

Pauline is a postdoctoral fellow and comes from France. She completed her PhD in biotechnology at the Paris Saclay University, where she modelled multi-scale biological networks for the metabolic engineering of a non-conventional yeast. She joined the Ralser lab in late 2019, where she is working on large-scale proteomic datasets to deepen our understanding of yeast metabolic adaptation and resilience.

Dr Simran Aulakh

Simran is a postdoctoral fellow and comes from India.

Dr Spyros Vernardis

Spyros is a postdoctoral fellow and comes from Greece. He's been studying metabolism at the cellular and organism levels using metabolomics. His latest interests are high-throughput proteomics in large population studies towards precision medicine applications.

Dr Sreejith Varma

Sreejith is a postdoctoral fellow and comes from India. He completed his PhD in chemistry with Jospeh Moran at the university of Strassbourg where he investigated the chemistry of protometabolic networks. At Markus's laboratory, he is currently investigating the biochemistry of extremophiles using proteomics and metabolomics.

Dr Steffen Lindner-Mehlich

Steffen is a postdoctoral fellow and comes from Germany. He's excited about metabolism. His main focus is to implement synthetic metabolism, aiming at engineering and optimizing microbes for bioproduction from sustainable carbon sources.

Dr Torsten Schwecke

Torsten is a researcher and comes from Germany. He is an experienced biochemist who's worked for many years in both academia and the biotechnology industry. He did his PhD in biochemistry at Technische Universität Berlin.

Alexis García Aviles

Alexis is a PhD student and comes from Panama. Before he joined the Ralser lab in 2021 he did his MSc in biotechnology at Wageningen University, the Netherlands.

Boris Zühlke

Boris is a PhD student and comes from Germany.

Clemens Dierks

Clemens is a PhD student and comes from Germany. He's a trained bioinformatician, working on clinical proteomics data sets.

Jan Krüsemann

Jan is a PhD student and comes from Germany. In the last few years, his most enjoyable and successful scientific experiences have revolved around the engineering of biological systems. He therefore chose to pursue a PhD in Synthetic Biology and work on the engineering of a quinone-dependent methanol dehydrogenase in E. coli to overcome thermodynamic limitations in synthetic methylotrophy. Currently he's working in the Ralser lab as a guest PhD student before transferring to Tobias Erb's lab at the MPI in Marburg in autumn 2022.

Mariella Obermeier

Mariella is a PhD student and comes from Germany.

Natalie Barthel

Natalie is a PhD student and comes from Germany.

Ziyue Wang

Ziyue is a PhD student and comes from China. She is working, among others, on developing a high-throughput proteomics method with clinical applications.

Andrea Lehmann

>

Andrea is a technical assistant and comes from Germany.

Anja Freiwald

Anja is an engineer and comes from Germany. She is responsible for mass spectrometers and programming tools to make "proteomics life" easier.

Christiane Kilian

Christiane is a technical assistant and comes from Germany. She's been working in biochemistry for many years and you can still amaze her. Besides technical help at the lab, she also helps newcomers with organizational issues.

Daniela Ludwig

Daniela is a technical assistant and comes from Germany. She's been working at the Institute of Biochemistry at the Charité since 1996. Daniela is in charge of sample management, sorting, and preparation for mass spectrometry. She helps keeping the lab organized and always has an open ear for everyone.