Speaker

Ben Engel is an associate professor at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel, Switzerland. His group explores the molecular architecture of organelles in diverse species, asking how organelle architecture directs molecular function, and reciprocally, how macromolecules sculpt and shape organelles. They use an integrated cellular structural biology approach, centered around cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET), which directly visualizes the structures and organization of macromolecules “in situ”, within the native cellular environment. Engel and colleagues have pioneered the application of cryo-ET to the study of bioenergetic organelles, including chloroplasts, mitochondria, and bacterial microcompartments. Their research seeks to understand how energy from environmental sources, such as sunlight, is converted into the biochemical energy of life.

Ben Engel received his bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley and performed his Ph.D. studies with Wallace Marshall at the University of California, San Francisco. Engel then moved to Germany, where he was a postdoc and project leader in the department of Wolfgang Baumeister at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, and later started an independent research group at the Helmholtz Pioneer Campus. In 2022, the Engel lab moved to the Biozentrum, where they teach the next generation of cellular structural biologists.

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