Petra Schwille

Petra Schwille is Director at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried near Munich, Germany, and Honorary Professor at LMU Munich. She studied physics and philosophy in Stuttgart and Göttingen, and graduated 1993 at the Georg August University, Göttingen. She obtained her Ph.D. in 1996 from the TU Braunschweig, with a thesis on Fluorescence (Cross-)Correlation Spectroscopy, performed at the MPI for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen, with Nobel Laureate Manfred Eigen. After a postdoctoral stay at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, she returned to the MPI Göttingen as a research group leader, financed by the BMBF Biofuture prize, in 1999. In 2002, she accepted a Chair of Biophysics at the newly established BIOTEC Center of the TU Dresden. Since 2012, she is heading the department Cellular and Molecular Biophysics at the MPI of Biochemistry and Honorary Professor of Physics at LMU Munich. Her scientific interests range from single molecule biophysics to the synthetic biology of reconstituted systems. Her work has been awarded with several prestigious prizes, among them the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation in 2010, and the Otto Warburg Medal in 2021. She is member of the German National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina), the National Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech), the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW), and the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), as well as Honorary Fellow of the Royal Microscopical Society (2015) and the Biophysical Society (2017). In 2018, she has been awarded with the Bavarian Maximilian Order for Science and Art.