Thomas Jenuwein

Thomas Jenuwein born in Lohr am Main, Germany, graduated in 1987 from EMBL Heidelberg working on fos oncogenes in the laboratory of Rolf Müller. He performed postdoctoral studies on the IgH enhancer with Rudolf Grosschedl at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF). As an independent group leader at the Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna (1993-2008), he focused his research to chromatin regulation. In 2000, he discovered the first histone lysine methyltransferase. He is now director at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics, Freiburg, Germany where he heads the department of Epigenetics. He was elected as an EMBO member in 2002 and received the Sir Hans Krebs Medal of the FEBS Society in 2005 and the Erwin Schrödinger Prize by the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 2007. From 2004 to 2009, he coordinated the EU-funded network of excellence 'The Epigenome', which connected more than 80 laboratories in Europe.