User:Diversithon/Carmen Birchmeier-Kohler

Carmen Birchmeier-Kohler

Early life and education
Carmen Birchmeier-Kohler was born July 6, 1955 in Waldshut, Germany. She is a geneticist and developmental biologist.

From 1974 to 1979, she studied biochemistry at the University of Konstanz, the University of California, San Diego, and the ETH Zürich. She completed her doctoral thesis with Max Birnstiel in 1984 at the Insitute for Molecular Biology II at the University of Zürich. After a post-doc with Michael Wigler's group at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Long Island, New York, from 1984 to 1989, she took a group leader position at the Max-Delbrück-Laboratory in Cologne, Germany at the campus of the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research (MPIPZ), where she obtained the German qualification of "Habilitation" in 1993.

Research and career
She has been working at the Max-Delbrück-Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) in Berlin, Germany, since 1995.

In 2002, she was awarded the Gottfried-Wilhelm-Leibniz Prize for her work in signal transduction between cells during mammalian embryo and organ development. In the same year, she became a professor (German academic rank C4) at the Faculty of Medicine at the Free University of Berlin, which is now the Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin. In 2013 she became a member of the Academia Europaea. In 2018, she was elected to the membership of the Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (German: Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina – Nationale Akademie der Wissenschaften).

Birchmeier-Kohler's research interests lie in the molecular biology of mammalian embryogenesis and organogenesis and its relation to developmental disorders of the nervous system, skeletal muscle and heart disease, as well as cancer. Using knockout mice, her research group investigates the role of various growth factors, their receptors and their downstream transcription factors in ontgeny.

Birchmeier-Kohler is married to the developmental biologist and cancer researcher, Walter Birchmeier.

Awards and honours

 * 2002 Leibniz Award of the German Science Foundation
 * 2001 European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO)
 * 1989 Bennigsen Förderpreis des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen