The W1 tenure-track Junior Professorship was advertised globally in July 2017 and 42 applications were received, 22 of which were from international research institutions, including candidates from Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Rockefeller University and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL).
Subsequently, eight promising talents were invited to present their research at a symposium on 29th November 2017. After an extensive debate, the recruitment committee agreed on four candidates and external experts were asked for an assessment. Dr. Michael Böttcher, an internationally recognized expert in CRISPR dissection of cancer signaling networks, accepted the offer of a junior professorship in December 2018 and began establishing a research group in the Charles Tanford Protein Centre in April 2019.
Dr. Michael Böttcher studied Molecular Biology in Freiburg, Germany, and conducted research for his diploma thesis at the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics (ACPFG) in Adelaide, Australia. His PhD and a first postdoc were performed at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg, followed by a second postdoc in the group of Michael McManus at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), USA. After returning to Germany, Michael Böttcher became a senior researcher at the Max-Planck Institute in Berlin, first as a member of the Hans Lehrach laboratory and later in the group of Emanuelle Charpentier. His main research focus is on the dissection of cancer genetic networks using e.g. CRISPR-based technologies.
