Prof. Lars-Oliver Essen

Lars-Oliver Essen was born in Münster (Germany) in 1965. He studied biochemistry at the University of Tübingen and the ETH Zurich (Switzerland) where he finished his studies in 1991 with a Diploma thesis in the institute of neurobiology of Prof. Melitta Schachner. He then joined the department of Prof. Hartmut Michel at the Max-Planck-Institute of Biophysics (Frankfurt/Main, Germany) and made in 1995 his PhD thesis about the design and structural analysis of antibodies with artificial antigen binding sites. During 1995 and 1996 he was a postdoctoral fellow of Dr. Roger Williams at the MRC Centre for Protein Engineering (Cambridge, UK) before he headed the structural biochemistry group in the department of membrane biochemistry at the MPI of Biochemistry (Prof. Dieter Oesterhelt, Martinsried, Germany). Since 2001 he is an associate professor of structural biochemistry at the Philipps-University Marburg. His reseach interests focus on the structural aspects of membrane proteins, photoreceptors and the application of genome-wide approaches to structural biology.