Henning Stahlberg

Henning Stahlberg is a German physicist and Professor at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel, Switzerland.

Henning Stahlberg studied physics at the TU (Technische Universität) Berlin and graduated with a doctorate from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) in 1997. He continued his research as a postdoctoral fellow at the Biozentrum, University of Basel for the following 6 years. From 2003 he joined the University of California in Davis as assistant professor, where he was promoted to tenured associate professor in 2007. Since 2009, Stahlberg is a Full Professor for Structural Biology at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel, where he heads the Center for Cellular Imaging and NanoAnalytics (C-CINA).

Henning Stahlberg studies biological membrane systems from the atomic structure of individual proteins to the cellular context of the system. Employing light and electron microscopy, x- ray crystallography, and electron tomography, he investigates the structure of ion channels and membrane transporters. Further, he develops computational algorithms for the 3D reconstruction of proteins. Using these methods, Stahlberg successfully elucidated among other things the 3D structure of the Type III Secretion System (T3SS) in intact bacteria. In addition he demonstrated that certain proteins at the base of the T3SS needle are elastic. He developed the 2dx software to reconstruct the 3D structure of membrane proteins from cryo-electron microscopy images of 2D crystals.

• 2004: NSF CAREER award, National Science Foundation, USA
• 2008: Chancellor’s Fellow Award, University of California in Davis, CA, USA
• 2009: W. M. Keck Award