Cell scientist to watch – Martin Loose

Martin Loose studied chemistry at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. He then joined Petra Schwille's group at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, where he obtained his PhD degree in 2010 for work on self-organization and pattern formation in the bacterial Min protein system. He then moved to Tim Mitchison's lab at Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA for his postdoc, funded by Human Frontier Science Program (HSFP) and European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) long-term fellowships; there, he discovered that the bacterial cell division proteins FtsA and FtsZ self-organize into dynamic cytoskeletal patterns. Martin established his independent research group at the Institute of Science and Technology (IST) Austria in 2015, supported by an European Research Council (ERC) starting grant and HFSP Young Investigator Grant. His lab studies the self-organization of bacterial cell division and small GTPase networks.