Anthony Hyman

Biosketch

Prof. Dr. Anthony Hyman is Director and Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics. 1984 he received his BSc first class in Zoology from the University College in London, where he had also been working as research Assistant in 1981. From 1985 to 1987 he wrote his PhD about “The establishment of division axes in early C.elegans embryos” under the supervision of Dr. John White at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, MRC in Cambridge, England. After that he moved to San Francisco where he did his postdoctoral research in the lab of Prof. Tim Mitchison at the University of California investigating the mechanism of chromosome movement studied in vitro. 1993 he became Group Leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, before he moved to Dresden in 1999 as a founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics. In 2002 he was named honorary Professor of Molecular Cell Biology at Dresden University of Technology.

Research Interests

The laboratory of Anthony Hyman studies the ways in which cells assemble membraneless organelles. His primary goal is to use principles of soft matter physics to understand how these organelles assemble and function. His particular interest is to understand the roles of phase separation and intrinsically disordered proteins in organelle assembly. He works on this problem using a number of different examples: Centrosomes, which are the major sites of microtubule nucleation; the cortex, which is a major signaling center to organize cells; and P granules/stress granules, which are collections of RNA/proteins required for the formation of the germline