Biography
Imre Berger was trained as a biochemist at Leibniz University and Medical School (MHH) in Hannover (Germany), MIT (Cambridge, USA), and ETH Zurich (Switzerland). He researches multiprotein complexes in human health and disease, engineers synthetic vacccines and develops enabling technologies for this purpose.
Imre carried out his PhD work at MIT with Alexander Rich, a founding father of molecular biology. He joined ETH Zurich as a post-doc and research assistant. In 2007, Imre was appointed Group Leader at EMBL. Since 2014, he is Professor of Biochemistry and Chemistry at the University of Bristol. From 2017 to 2022, he was Director of the Bristol Synthetic Biology Centre BrisSynBio. Since 2019, Imre is Founding Director of the Max Planck Bristol Centre for Minimal Biology.
Prof. Berger has pioneered synthetic virus-derived nanosystems for DNA and protein delivery and genome engineering. The tools he developed are accelerating research and development in academia and industry world-wide. He holds international patents in protein and DNA technologies, founded four biotech companies, publishes prolifically in leading periodicals and received numerous distinctions, including the Swiss Venture Award, the Swiss Technology Award, the W.A. DeVigier Foundation Award and a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award for his innovative research. Since 2019, Imre is Investigator of the European Research Council (ERC). In 2022, Imre was elected to the fellowship of the Academy of Medical Sciences in the UK.