Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard

Portrait of Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard
Biography

Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard is Director Emeritus of the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen and Nobel Laureate. She studied biology, physics and biochemistry in Frankfurt and Tübingen (diploma in biochemistry, Dr. rer nat. genetics in 1973), was a postdoc in Basel and Freiburg, group leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg and the Friedrich Miescher Laboratory of the Max Planck Society in Tübingen, and director at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology since 1985. From 2014 to 2022, she led an emeritus group conducting research on the formation of color patterns in fish. Her research was on the genetic analysis of development in animals, the fruit fly "Drosophila melanogaster" and the zebrafish "Danio rerio". She has received numerous awards, including the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology in 1995, for her discoveries of genes controlling animal and human development, as well as evidence of shape-shifting gradients in the fly embryo. From 2013 to 2021, she was Chancellor of the Order Pour le mérite of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard has published numerous scientific articles in scientific journals. Furthermore, she wrote several non-fiction books and popular science publications.