HELMHOLTZ HIPS - Key Persons
Annette Herkströter is assistant to the head of the department, Prof. Christine Beemelmanns. She takes care of organizational and administrative tasks for the head of department and the team.
Annika Engel studied mathematics at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern from 2013 to 2019. She wrote her master's thesis on 3D CT images of mouse lungs in the Image Processing group at Fraunhofer ITWM in Kaiserslautern as part of Cystic fibrosis research. From 2020 to 2021, she was a researcher associate at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence in Saarbrücken. Since 2021, she has been employed as a PhD student at the "Chair for Clinical Bioinformatics" of the Saarland University. There, she works with medical images from different fields such as cardiology and gastroenterology and evaluates RNA sequencing data in the light of various questions.
Job Titles:
- Assistant to the Institute Management
- Management
Job Titles:
- Assistant to the Institute Management
Job Titles:
- Member of the Scientific Advisory Board
Dirk Hauck made an apprenticeship as Chemielaborant at Merck in Darmstadt and received a Vordiplom in Chemistry from the University of Frankfurt. Since February 2011 he is in the Titz group as lab technician.
He is mainly involved in chemical synthesis and analysis, support of lab members, and organizes the lab routine and maintenance of the equipment.
Work in the Empting lab focuses on tackling innovative and difficult-to-address anti-infective targets such as bacterial virulence regulatory systems as well as un(der)explored anti-herpesviral persitance mediators. By this, we aspire to circumvent common resistance mechanisms and to refill the dried out development pipeline.
Sebastian completed his studies in biomedical chemistry at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz with a thesis in the group of Prof. Horst Kunz on gold-catalyzed glycosylations. He then received his doctorate from the Free University of Berlin in the group of Prof. Peter H. Seeberger. He was honored with the Otto Hahn Medal in 2014 for his work in carbohydrate chemistry and vaccine development. Further postdoctoral work took him into the world of natural product research and microbiology (Prof. Pierre Stallforth, HKI in Jena) as well as chemical biology and cell biology (Prof. Motonari Uesugi, Kyoto University, JSPS scholarship). As a scientific consultant at the University of Koblenz Landau, he also gained experience in science management by advising scientists in the area of third-party funding acquisition.
Job Titles:
- Scientific Assistant to the Managing Director
Dr. Stephanie Thomas has been working at the HIPS as the Administrative Director since September 2019. In this role, she is responsible for managing all non-scientific processes at HIPS and coordinates the administrative processes between HIPS in Saarbrücken and HZI in Braunschweig. Due to her former work in the science department of the State Chancellery of Saarland, Dr. Stephanie Thomas has profound knowledge of the German science system, as well as many years of experience in the supervision and promotion of scientific institutions. As head of the Department of Non-University Research and Technology Transfer, Dr. Thomas was instrumental in the coordination and project development for the innovation strategy of the Saarland.
Dr. Stephanie Thomas holds a diploma in business administration and a doctorate in business informatics.
Job Titles:
- Scientific Assistant to the Managing Director
Tanya Clements-Decker completed her PhD in the Microbiology department at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. After graduation, she began a two-year postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Johannesburg. During this fellowship, her research focused on using metabolomics and genome mining approaches to discover novel antimicrobial lipopeptides and elucidate the mechanisms of action.
Thorsten Kinsinger completed his bachelor and master studies in chemistry at Saarland University in Saarbrücken. Afterwards, he worked as a PhD student in the group of Prof. Dr. Uli Kazmaier on the C-H activation of amino acid derivatives and Matteson homologation reactions. After the completion of his PhD thesis in 2022, he joined Prof. Dr. Alexander Titz in the group Chemical Biology of Carbohydrates as a PostDoc focusing on the synthesis of novel antivirals in 2023.
Yaming Liu completed his bachelor's and master's degrees in biotechnology and bioengineering respectively in China. After working at BGI, he came to Germany in 2019 and obtained his PhD in biochemistry in 2023. Then, he joined the group of Prof. Dr. Christine Beemelmanns in September 2023. He is interested in OMICS technologies and mass spectrometry. His research at HIPS focuses on bioengineering of biosynthetic pathways for medically important natural products.
Job Titles:
- Scientific Strategy Officer
Yen Thi Hai Lam obtained her B.Sc. in Chemistry and Education from the Hanoi National University of Education, Vietnam. This was followed in 2012 by a M.Sc. in Organic Chemistry at the same University in Vietnam. During Mater program she became a lecturer of Faculty of Chemistry at Hanoi National University of Education, Vietnam until 2016 before joining the group of Natural Products and Metabolomics at Leibniz Institute of Plant Biochemistry in Halle (Saale), Germany, where she received her PhD in Chemistry in December 2022. After that she joined the group of Prof. Christine Beemelmanns in April 2023. Her research focuses on the chemical study of fungi to characterize new natural products of biological interest.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Scientific Advisory Board
Konrad Wagner studied chemistry (B.Sc.) at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena. After his Bachelor thesis (Synthesis of Blebbistatin and derivatives) he startet his Master studies at Jena with focus on synthetic chemistry and drug design. During his Master thesis he worked on Arylphosphosphoniumsalts of N-Heteroaromatic compounds and their reactions with C, N, O, and S-nucleophiles. He finished his thesis in 2020 and started his PhD studies a year later in the working group "Anti-Infective Drug Discovery" of Dr. Martin Empting. He will focus his research on the synthesis and optimization of new drug candidates for the new antitumor and diabetes target IMP2 as well as the synthesis and optimization of anti-viral drugs against HSV.
Job Titles:
- Assistant to the Administrative Director
Mario Fares graduated with a BSc in Medical Laboratory Sciences from the University of Balamand in Beirut with an emphasis on Medical Bacteriology. He later pursued his MSc in Biotechnology at the University of Glasgow with an emphasis on bacterial genetic recombination. Afterwards, Mario decided to work as a research developer at the Biotechnology department of Benta Pharmaceutical Industries where he dealt with Circulating Tumor Cells and B-islet cell encapsulation for subcutaneous transplantation. Currently, he is pursuing his PhD at HIPS in the group Chemical Biology of Carbohydrates lead by his direct supervisor Prof. Dr. Titz, and will be in charge of elucidating the role of a newly characterized lectin in Enterobacter cloacae that is suspected to play a role in biofilm formation and infections in neonates and immunocompromised individuals. Also, he will be testing an antagonist to this lectin as a potential pathoblocker, and study its effects on the pathogenesis of Enterobacter cloacae. His work will be carried out in collaboration with Saarland University Hospital at the Institute of Medical Microbiology and Hygiene in Homburg under the co-supervision of Prof. Dr. Markus Bischoff and the partnership of Prof. Dr. Michael Zemlin as part of the interdisciplinary graduate school for drug research, UdS-HIPS TANDEM.
Job Titles:
- Deputy Chairman of the HZI Supervisory Board
Pascal Hirsch completed a master's degree in bioinformatics at Saarland University in 2021. He has been a PhD student under the supervision of Prof. Andreas Keller since 2021. His research focuses on cloud computing and the creation of web applications and databases in the areas of microRNA and bacterial research.
Alexander Titz studied chemistry at the Technical University Darmstadt and the University of Bordeaux I. For his diploma thesis, he moved to the Protein Structure Unit at Novartis Pharma in Basel. After receiving his doctorate from the University of Basel in 2008, covering the medicinal chemistry of carbohydrate-protein interactions, he conducted post-doctoral research at the Institute of Microbiology and Immunology at ETH Zürich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology). In 2010, he was awarded the Klaus-Grohe Prize for medicinal chemistry of the GDCh.
After establishing a research group at the Zukunftskolleg of the University of Constance focusing on carbohydrate chemistry and inhibitors of bacterial biofilm formation, Alexander Titz has been head of the research group ‘Chemical Biology of Carbohydrates' at the Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland (HIPS), an outpost of the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research, since 2013. His group is furthermore part of the German Centre for Infection Research (DZIF), a national association of the German Centres for Health Research. Alexander Titz is teaching at Saarland University since 2014 and has been appointed Juniorprofessor for Chemical Biology in 2018.
Since 2017, the research in the Titz lab is funded by an ERC starting grant of the European Research Council. In 2018, Alexander Titz was awarded the Innovation Award in Medical/Pharmaceutical Chemistry by the German Chemical Society and the German Pharmaceutical Society as well as the Prize for a Young Medicinal Chemist in Academia of the European Federation of Medicinal Chemistry (EFMC). In 2019, Alexander obtained a call for the professorship for Organic Chemistry at the University of Osnabrück. Since 2020, Alexander Titz holds a professorship for Organic and Pharmaceutical Chemistry at Saarland University.
Andreas Keller studied bioinformatics at Saarland University in Saarbrücken from 2002 to 2005, and completed his doctoral studies in bioinformatics by 2009. Following this, he transitioned to industry and worked, among others, for Siemens Healthineers until 2013. In Erlangen, he led the Diagnostic Innovations group while also completing his habilitation in human genetics at Saarland University Hospital. Since 2013, Keller has been a Full Professor of Clinical Bioinformatics at Saarland University, and has been associated with HIPS since 2018. From 2019 to 2021, he served as a Visiting Professor at Stanford University in California. Since 2022, in addition to his university professorship, he has also been heading the department of Clinical Bioinformatics at HIPS.
Keller's research focuses on using computer-assisted methods to analyze RNAs. One area of research is on the regulatory mechanisms of non-coding RNAs, as well as the effect of various influencing factors on the single-cell transcriptome, which is resolved in both time and space. Based on his experience in modeling regulatory influences, Keller has dedicated his HIPS department to studying the interaction of bacteria with humans. In this research, he explores the exchange of information and material between commensal and pathogenic bacteria, as well as their host. The goal is to find new producers of natural products and identify new natural products, which can serve as a starting point for the development of new active substances. From a medical point of view, his research aims to better understand and influence the aging process, as well as neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
Rolf Müller studied pharmacy in Bonn, where he also obtained his PhD in 1994. After a two-year research scholarship at the University of Washington in Seattle, he became junior group leader at the Gesellschaft für Biotechnologische Forschung in Braunschweig. In 2003, he was appointed professor for Pharmaceutical Biotechnology at Saarland University. He became founding director of the new Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland (HIPS) in 2009. Since then he is in charge of the HIPS management and leads the department for Microbial Natural Products. Rolf Müller is elected member of both acatech and Leopoldina as well as speaker of the research area "Novel Antibiotics" within the framework of the German Center for Infection Research (DZIF). In 2021, Rolf Müller was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz-Prize.
Rebecca Kochems has an MSc in Ecology and Microbial Diversity and works since March 2023 as technical assistant at HIPS in the group Anti-Infectives from Microbiota.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Scientific Advisory Board