Nikolaus Rajewsky

Nikolaus Rajewsky is the Scientific Director of the Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology at the Max Delbrück Center (MDC-BIMSB) in Berlin Mitte, which he founded in 2008. The MDC-BIMSB now houses about 25 labs. Nikolaus Rajewsky investigates how and why genes are switched on or off in healthy and diseased cells, and develops methods to interfere with disease trajectories. A special focus is on non-coding RNAs. To this end, he combines computational approaches (computer science, statistics, theoretical physics) with methods from biochemistry and molecular biology. Nikolaus Rajewsky is a member of numerous international advisory boards, an elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), the “Leopoldina” (German Academy of Sciences) as well as the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. He is among the most highly cited researchers in his field and has received numerous awards, including an honorary doctorate from La Sapienza University in Rome and the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize from the German Research Foundation DFG.