Organizer

Simon Alberti is a Professor at the Biotechnology Center, Technische Universität Dresden in Germany. He received his PhD in 2004 in Biology from the University of Bonn, Germany. From 2005-2009 he was a postdoc in the lab of Susan Lindquist at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research (Cambridge, USA), where he worked on prions and amyloids in budding yeast. From 2010 to 2019 he was a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) in Dresden, studying proteostasis and the molecular principles underlying cytoplasmic organization. His recent work shows that cells form many membraneless compartments via a biophysical process known as phase separation. Importantly, the ability to form such compartments becomes detrimental with increasing age, because compartment-forming proteins have a tendency to misfold and aggregate and thus are closely tied to the pathogenesis associated with age-related neurodegenerative diseases such as ALS.

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