Sebastian Leidel - Biography#

Sebastian Leidel became a Lecturer at the Institute of Biochemistry at the ETH Zurich, Switzerland in 2008. Subsequently, he started his independent research group as a Max Planck Research Groupleader at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine in Münster, Germany as part of the flagship program of the Max Planck Society for junior groups. In this position he became affiliated with several scientific networks like the Münster Graduate School for Evolution, the Excellence Cluster Cells-in-motion, the National priority program 'Chemical Biology of Native Nucleic Acid Modifications' and other European networks like a COST action and an ERA network.

Since August 2018, he has been a Full Professor and vice director at the department of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Bern, Switzerland. His research goal is to understand the in vivo roles of natural chemical tRNA modifications in development and disease and he is a leading figure in this research area in Europe. A recent breakthrough that came out of his laboratory is the finding that perturbations in local translation rates trigger the aggregation of metastable proteins. To this end he utilized tRNA modification mutants to specifically perturb translation rates of defined codons.

Sebastian Leidel received his PhD from the University of Lausanne, Switzerland under the supervision of Prof. Pierre Gönczy in collaboration with the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research (ISREC). His postdoctoral research was funded by grants by the European Science Foundation (ESF) and a personal grant by the UBS Promedica Research Foundation. He received the prestigious James Heineman Research Award for Outstanding Research Achievements for his work in tRNA modifications and is regularly invited to speak at international conferences about his work. In 2012 he received an ERC starting grant.

Finally, he became an active advocate for the voice of non-tenured researchers as an spokesman of the Max Planck Research Group Leaders of the biomedical section, at a steering committee member of the Max Planck Leadnet and most importantly as an elected board member of the Young Academy of Europe. There he took up the responsibility to draft its code of conduct and was treasurer from 2016 - 2018. As a board member he also participated in the COST action Sci-generation and advised the European Commission on open science as an external expert through the RISE mechanism.