Martin Zenke

Martin Zenke grew up in Korbach/Waldeck, Germany and finished school at Alte Landesschule in Korbach in 1972. He studied chemistry/biochemistry and medicine at Philipps-University, Marburg/Lahn, Germany (1972-1978) and graduated in 1978 with a study on “The ribonucleotide reductase in synchronized cultures of Saccharomyces cerevisiae (baker’s yeast)”.

In 1979 he moved to German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Heidelberg, Institute of Virology, Section DNA Tumor Viruses (Gerhard Sauer) for doctoral studies. He received his PhD from Ruprecht-Karls-University, Heidelberg in 1982 on “Transcription of SV40 Chromatin”.

From 1982 to 1985 Martin Zenke worked as postdoctoral fellow with Pierre Chambon at Université Louis Pasteur, Faculté de Médecine and Laboratoire de Genetique Moleculaire des Eucaryotes (LGME) in Strasbourg, France. From 1985 to 1988 he was EMBL fellow in the Differentiation Programme of European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Heidelberg, Germany with Thomas Graf and Hartmut Beug.

In 1988 he moved to Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP), Vienna, Austria to work as a Junior Scientist until 1995. In 1992 he received his senior lecture qualification in Molecular Genetics from the Faculty of Natural Sciences, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria. From 1995 to 2003 Martin Zenke was a Research Group Leader at Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) in Berlin, Germany.

Since 2003 he is Professor of Cell Biology and Chairman, and the founding director of the Institute for Biomedical Engineering, Chair of Cell Biology at Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule (RWTH) Medical School, Aachen, Germany. Since 2008 he is member of the "Central Ethics Committee for Stem Cell Research", Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and Federal Ministry of Health (BMG), Berlin, Germany and since 2011 Managing Director of Helmholtz-Institute for Biomedical Engineering, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany.

Martin Zenke’s research focuses on the transcriptional regulation of gene expression. In 1986 he and his colleagues showed that transcriptional enhancers exhibit a modular structure and are composed of individual elements, which on their own are rather weak but act in synergy, and thereby build up enhancer activity. In 1988 Martin Zenke started to work on retroviral oncogenes, in particular on the v-erbA and v-rel oncogenes. His laboratory constructed a series of oncogenes that could be switched on and off at will. These conditional oncogenes were used to study differentiation of hematopoietic progenitor cells into red blood cells and antigen presenting dendritic cells.

In following up on this work the Zenke laboratory now focuses on stem cells, in particular on hematopoietic stem cells and their differentiated progeny. Current work also includes studies on embryonic stem cells and reprogramming of somatic cells towards pluripotency (cellular engineering) and on tissue engineering.

• List of publications in PubMed (U.S. National Library of Medicine und National Institutes of Health)