Karl Kuchler's group is investigating the molecular basis of host immunity against infection by pathogenic fungi and their resistance mechanisms. The lab is particularly interested in deciphering the molecular signaling processes that lead to excessive inflammatory immune reactions in the innate or adaptive immune defense system. They employ systems biology approaches to gain a better understanding of the dynamics of host-pathogen interactions. The aim of their work is to identify novel approaches to the treatment of microbial infections. Karl Kuchler obtained his PhD in Biochemistry from the Technical University of Graz. He did postdoctoral research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Salzburg, the University of California in Berkeley, USA, and at the University of Edmonton in Alberta, Canada. He started his research group at the Vienna BioCenter in the then Medical Faculty of the University of Vienna in 1992 and was a founding member of the Max Perutz Labs.

The lab of Thomas Leonard is interested in understanding the basic principles that govern the flow of information in cells. In particular, his team studies how lipids control the activity of signaling enzymes, including kinases and phosphatases, and how these mechanisms are dysregulated in disease. Thomas Leonard studied Biochemistry at the University of Bristol (UK) before obtaining a PhD in Structural Biology at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge (UK). He moved to the USA in 2005 as an EMBO postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD and started his own lab at the Max Perutz Labs in 2012. He is the Curriculum Director of the Master’s program ‘Molecular Precision Medicine’, a joint program of the University of Vienna and the Medical University of Vienna dedicated to an understanding of human pathogenesis and the treatment of disease at a molecular level.

Thomas Juffmann’s interdisciplinary team of biologists and physicists works on improving the sensitivity of microscopy systems. In every image taken through a light or electron microscope the number of detected photons or electrons is finite. This leads to noise and consequently limits the resolution and sensitivity of the microscope. The team tries to maximize the information obtained per detected probe particle in microscopy techniques commonly used in structural and cellular biology (such as phase microscopy, interferometric scattering microscopy, or transmission electron microscopy). This is achieved using wave-front shaping techniques, cavity enhancement, or quantum metrology techniques. Thomas Juffmann did his PhD on molecular quantum optics at the University of Vienna and then carried out postdoctoral work at Stanford University (USA) from 2013 to 2016. He joined the École normale supérieure Paris (France) as a HFSP fellow and started his lab at the Max Perutz Labs and the Faculty of Physics of the University of Vienna in 2018.