Kathrin Lang

Kathrin Lang studied Chemistry at the University of Innsbruck, Austria where she obtained a PhD in 2008. After postdoctoral research in the group of Venki Ramakrishnan on ribosome structural biology and in the lab of Jason Chin on synthetic biology at the MRC-LMB in Cambridge, UK, she was appointed in 2014 as a Tenure Track Assistant Professor at TU Munich, Germany, where she was tenured and promoted to permanent W3 Professor of Synthetic Biochemistry in 2020. Since April 2021 she is Full Professor of Chemical Biology at the ETH Zürich, Switzerland.

Her general research interests lie in the interdisciplinary area between Chemistry and Biology, applying concepts from organic chemistry and protein engineering to develop new tools for investigating, modulating and designing novel molecular networks in living cells. Her group is especially active in enabling approaches to expand the genetic code and to endow proteins with novel chemical reactivities within their physiological environment. By equipping proteins with novel functionalities her group aims to (i) design and apply bioorthogonal reactions to image proteins and control enzyme activity in living cells, (ii) develop chemical tools to map protein-protein interactions and (iii) deploy novel chemoenzymatic approaches to study ubiquitylation/deubiquitylation pathways.