Martin Lercher
Born in 1967, Martin J. Lercher is a German computational biologist and Full Professor at the Institute of Computer Science and the Department of Biology of Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf in Germany, where he heads the Computational Cell Biology Lab.[1]. Lercher has made numerous contributions to computational biology, where he seeks to understand evolution on a systems level, in particular focusing on cellular resource allocation in metabolism and cell growth (e.g., [HECKMANN 2013, DOURADO 2020, HU 2020]). He also publishes on creativity in the sciences [2], and contributed to several popular science books [BOOKS].
Academic training
After earning his undergraduate degree in Physics from the University of Cologne, Lercher went on to earn a PhD in Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge, working on high-temperature superconductivity.
Research
During his postdoctoral fellowship (2000-2006), Lercher worked with Prof. Laurence Hurst at the University of Bath (UK), where he also first collaborated with Csaba Pál and Balázs Papp. During this period, he also began a long-term collaboration with Peer Bork at the [European Molecular Biology Laboratory] (EMBL) in Heidelberg. Here he worked on principles of genomic organization and global gene regulation, producing a set of influential papers [REF].
Since 2007, Lercher has been at Heinrich Heine University, where he has worked on aspects of molecular networks from genomic and biophysical perspectives. In one work on the evolution of photosynthesis, he and his colleagues simulated the fitness landscape of a complex biological system, demonstrating that it is possible to predict molecular evolutionary adaptation quantitatively over a million-year timescale [3]
In recent years, Lercher has directed his attention to the study of analytical properties of cell growth, searching for aspects of cell dynamics that "unveil fundamental quantitative principles of cellular resource allocation and growth"[4]
Awards
Lercher is the recipient of both a Royal Society University Research Fellowship and a Heisenberg Fellowship.
Popular science activities
Martin Lercher is co-author with Itai Yanai of The Society of Genes a popular science book on understanding the human genome[5]. This book was reviewed widely and translated into seven languages. In this book, Yanai and Lercher propose the metaphor of a society of genes for the set of all genes distributed across human genomes.
He is a member of The Edge community[6], where he participated in two books[7][8]
Lercher also publishes editorials on the topic of Night Science together with Itai Yanai[2]. These have the thesis that a description of the scientific process is incomplete without a consideration of how it is that hypotheses are generated in the first place.
Hobbies
Lercher is a singer-songwriter and also practices Zumba in his free time.
References
- ↑ Lercher, Martin. "Universität Düsseldorf: Computational Cell Biology @ HHU". www.cs.hhu.de. Retrieved 14 April 2021.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 "Night Science Collection". www.biomedcentral.com. Retrieved 2020-08-29.
- ↑ Heckmann, David; Schulze, Stefanie; Denton, Alisandra; Gowik, Udo; Westhoff, Peter; Weber, Andreas P. M.; Lercher, Martin J. (2013-06-20). "Predicting C4 Photosynthesis Evolution: Modular, Individually Adaptive Steps on a Mount Fuji Fitness Landscape". Cell. 153 (7): 1579–1588. doi:10.1016/j.cell.2013.04.058. ISSN 0092-8674. PMID 23791184. Unknown parameter
|s2cid=ignored (help) - ↑ Dourado, Hugo; Lercher, Martin J. (2020-03-06). "An analytical theory of balanced cellular growth". Nature Communications. 11 (1): 1226. Bibcode:2020NatCo..11.1226D. doi:10.1038/s41467-020-14751-w. ISSN 2041-1723. PMC 7060212 Check
|pmc=value (help). PMID 32144263 Check|pmid=value (help). Unknown parameter|s2cid=ignored (help) - ↑ Cite error: Invalid
<ref>tag; no text was provided for refs namedauto2 - ↑ "Martin Lercher | Edge.org". www.edge.org. Retrieved 2020-08-29.
- ↑ "WHAT SCIENTIFIC TERM OR CONCEPT OUGHT TO BE MORE WIDELY KNOWN? | Edge.org". www.edge.org. Retrieved 2020-08-29.
- ↑ "WHAT IS THE LAST QUESTION? | Edge.org". www.edge.org. Retrieved 2020-08-29.
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