Joachim Lingner - Biography#

Dr. Joachim Lingner is full professor for life sciences at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. He obtained his PhD at the Biocenter of the University of Basel with Dr. Walter Keller. As a postdoc, he worked in the laboratory of Dr. Thomas Cech at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute of the University of Colorado at Boulder. Dr. Lingner obtained the Friedrich Miescher Prize (2002), is elected EMBO member (2005) and ERC advanced investigator awardee (2008). He has been on the advisory editorial boards of EMBO J., EMBO Rep. and Nucleic Acids Res, SAB member Center of Integrative Genomics (CIG) of the University of Lausanne, and ERC starting grant review panel member.

Dr. Lingner’s work is aimed at obtaining mechanistic insights into the structure and function of human telomeres in health, cancer development and in aging. His group developed telomeric chromatin analysis protocols to determine telomere protein composition by mass spectrometry and elucidate its dynamics during replication under normal and pathological situations. The laboratory discovered the telomeric long noncoding RNA TERRA and investigates its function. The laboratory also elucidated how telomerase is regulated at chromosome ends. It determined how telomerase is recruited to telomeres, how it extends preferentially short telomeres and how extension is terminated. As a postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Lingner discovered the catalytic subunit of telomerase. As a PhD student, he purified poly(A) polymerase and identified its gene in yeast.