Curriculum Vitae Prof. Kai Johnsson

Kai Johnsson is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research, Department of Chemical Biology since 2017. He was appointed after being Full Professor at the Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and co-director of the NCCR Chemical Biology. His current research interests are the development and application of chemical approaches to study and manipulate protein function. His past achievements include the introduction of different approaches to specifically label proteins in living cells; among these the SNAP-tag and CLIP-tag have become popular in the biological community.

Kai Johnsson is Executive Editor of the Journal of the American Chemical Society since 2021. He is member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Science and of the Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation. He is co-founder of Covalys Biosciences which was based on protein labeling technologies developed in his laboratory; these technologies are now available through New England BioLabs. He received the Prix APLE for the invention of the year 2003 of EPFL, the Novartis Lectureship Award 2012/13, the Karl-Heinz Beckurts Prize 2016 and is elected member of EMBO.

 

Education

 

1992

PhD in Chemistry, Department of Chemistry, ETH Zürich, Switzerland

1988

Diploma in Chemistry, Department of Chemistry, ETH Zürich, Switzerland

 

 

Positions held

1993 - 1996

Postdoctoral fellow; Department of Chemistry, UC Berkeley, USA

1996 - 1999

Independent researcher; Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany

1999 - 2005

Assistant Professor; Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering, EPFL Lausanne

2005 - 2009

Associate Professor; Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering, EPFL Lausanne

2009 - 17

 

2018 -

Full Professor; Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering, EPFL Lausanne, Switzerland

Affiliated Professor; Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering, EPFL Lausanne, Switzerland

2017-

Director; Max Planck Institute for Medical Research, Heidelberg, Germany, Head of the Department of Chemical Biology

 

 

Commissions/ Commitees

2003 - 2010

Board of Directors, Covalys Biosciences, Switzerland

2003 - 2015

Member of the steering committee of Institute of Chemical Sciences, EPFL

2010 - 2017

Co-Director of the Swiss-wide research program NCCR Chemical Biology

2012 - 2017

Member of the school-wide tenure committee of EPFL

 

 

Scientific Advisory Boards

2015 -

Scientific Advisory Committee of EMBL

2014 - 2017

Scientific Advisory Board, Quartet Medicines, Boston, USA

 

 

Editorial Boards

2005 - 2020

Associate Editor of ACS Chemical Biology

2006 -

Editorial Board of Chemistry&Biology, ChemBioChem, Chemical Society Reviews

2012 - 2020

Editorial Advisory Board of Science

2021 -

 

Executive Editor of the Journal of the American Chemical Society

 

Awards

 

2003

Prix APLE for the invention of the year 2003 of EPFL Lausanne

2011

Amgen Lecture, UC Berkeley

2012

Leica Scientific Forum Lectureship Japan (Osaka, Kyoto, Tokyo)

2012 - 2013

Novartis Lectureship Award

2013

Elected Member of EMBO

2015

AbbVie Lecture, UC Berkeley

2016

2019

2021

Karl Heinz Beckurts-Preis

Elected Member of the Heidelberg Akademie der Wissenschaften

Hansen Family Award in Medical Sciences

 

 

Entrepreneurship

2003

Co-founder of Covalys Biosciences; development of tools for protein labeling

2013

Co-founder of Quartet Medicine; development of new treatments for neuropathic pain

2014

Co-founder of Spirochome SA; development of new probes for fluorescence microscopy

  

 

 

 
 
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