Former graduate students:

Reto Bader, who was my first PhD student. Being trained in biochemistry and mathematics he used molecular biology, solid-phase peptide synthesis, NMR spectroscopy and other techniques to develop our ideas on membrane-binding of hormones. Reto is now a teacher for biology and mathematics.

Mirjam Lerch has carried on his work with much enthusiasm. She has been looking into chimeric peptides of NPY and PP and compared NPY, PYY and PP. Mirjam is now working in an oncology institute at a hospital.

Chao Zou established the biochemistry of GPCR fragments. He is now at Novartis.

Alexey Neumoin studied folding and determined the first structure of a double-TM GPCR fragment. Alexey is back in Moscow.

Jiri Mares who developed a glycolipid system, investigated LPS and studied peptide folding. Jiri is presently working in research (NMR theory) in Finland.

Nadine Keller was a graduate student from the crystallography lab of Markus Grütter. Since her procaspase-8 protein did not want to crystalize she joined my lab for some time and determined the structure by NMR.

Sowmini Kumaran worked together with Chao on the GPCR project as well as with Jiri on glycolipids. She is now back in India.

Reto Walser developed a GPCR mimetic based on a beta barrel protein, and is now in the NMR Department of Astex in Cambridge, UK.

Christina Ewald worked on Armadillo repeat proteins and determined the structure of a large ArmRP and peptide complex. She is now member of the flow cytometry facility at UZH.

Jacopo Marino developed biochemical methods for establishing the topology of membrane proteins, in particular GPCR fragments. He is a project leader now at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) in Villingen, Switzerland.

Harsha Kocherla worked on the structure of 2-TM fragments of GPCRs from the Y4 receptor. He is now with Novartis.

Martin Poms worked on the structure of 3-TM fragments of GPCRs from the Ste2p receptor. He is now working at the University Hospital of Zurich.

Malgorsata Sitnik established segmental isotope labeling methods in my lab working with Armadillo repeat proteins. She is now at Biogen.

Philipp Ansorge has established nanodisc technology in my lab. He also started our work on bacteriorhodopsin. He was known in the lab as Mister Happiness. He is now in a small consultant company in Freiburg.

Laurens Kooijman worked on the resonance assignment of bacteriorhodopsin, and determined the dynamics from methyl relaxation. He was the first to do serious coding in my group. He is on a secret mission still in the NMR business now...

Matthias Schuster established biochemical methods for a thermostabilized GPCR, a1b adrenergic receptor. He continues on in my group as a Postdoc on the antibiotics project.

Stefano Cucuzza developed algorithms to determine structures of repeat proteins from pseudocontact shifts and studied their binding to peptides. He works now for Novartis.

Kathryn Oi studied peptide drugs disrupting the LPS biosynthesis and their mode of action as antibiotics. She determined a few structures of complexes and used biophysical methods to measure the binding strengths.

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Former Postdocs:

Sivakami Chandrasekaran was my first Posdoc and worked on models for single TM-spanning peptides in order to investigate the effect of the lipid environment on pK values.

Svava Wetzel started investigating repeat proteins in my group, and studied folding of Ankyrin repeat proteins.

Xuan Shao expressed and studied 2-TM fragments from the Y4 GPCR.

Randall Watson discovered that ArmRP can be reconstituted from complementary fragments, which is the basis of the protein origami project.

Martin Christen carried on the work of Randall and determined the structure of a complex derived from 2 complementary ArmRP fragments. Martin is now with the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF).

Erich Michel continued on the Armadillo fragment project. He did a fantastic job by expanding the complementation to small libraries. He is now in the lab of Andreas Plückthun.

 

Former Bachelor and Master students:

Many Master project students (Verena Gafner, Margot Mayrhofer, Gaby Rytz, Sandra Lauber, Claudia Fischer, Karin Weber, Tanja Schäfer, Fabian Bumbak, Jon Graf, Christian Baumann, Milicia Pantic, David Streuli, Pengfei Liu, Renato Valsecchi, Laetitia Rozic, Ardit Lila and Monika Trglic) and Bachelor students (Barbara Christen, Fabienne Büchler) have ruined their life while working with me...