Job openings & fellowships Job openings
Select Page
Prof Michael Krieg
Prof Michael Krieg

New Group Leader

Dr. Michael Krieg joins ICFO to start a new group focusing on Neurophotonics and Mechanical Systems Biology

May 17, 2017

We are very pleased to announce the arrival of new Group Leader Dr Michael Krieg, who is building a lab that will focus on Neurophotonics and Mechanical Systems Biology. He will use Caenorhabditis elegans as a model to study the importance of cell’s mechanical properties for health and disease on the molecular and systems levels, exploiting microfluidic and nanotechnological tools to apply precise forces to single cells or animals. His group will also strive to establish an optogenetic neurotransmitter system with the aim to rewire neuronal circuits in diseased animals.

Dr Krieg defended his thesis on December 9th in 2009 at TU Dresden in Daniel Mueller and CP Heisenberg’s lab. Using atomic force microscopy, he characterized the contribution of single molecule adhesion events to multicellular development in zebrafish, a body of work which he continued during his first postdoctoral work at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics. Most recently, he has focused on deciphering the mechanical basis of the sense of touch as a postdoctoral researcher in the lab or Dr Miriam Goodman in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at Stanford University School of Medicine. In his work, he used C elegans to study mechanosensation and stability and found that neurons with defects in Alzheimer related proteins behave like twisted ropes and curly hair.

The ERC recently awarded Dr Krieg a Starting Grant that will fund research in his new lab for the project titled “How to build a brain? Engineering molecular systems for mechanosensation and protection in neurons”.

Welcome Michael!