IST Austria Assistant Professor named as HFSP grantee

Tobias Bollenbach, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (IST Austria) since 2010, has been awarded a Program Grant of the Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP). This grant supports new collaborations among teams of scientists working in different countries. Together with three international partners the biological physicist will work on “Revealing the fundamental limits of cell growth” as the according project application is entitled. The combined budget for Måns Ehrenberg (Uppsala University, Sweden), Johan Paulsson (Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA), Erdal Toprak (Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey) and Tobias Bollenbach amounts to a total of US $ 450.000 per year. The total duration of the program grant is three years.

The Human Frontier Science Program funds frontier research in the life sciences. The highly competitive grants are regarded as very prestigious in this field. This year, 10 Young Investigator Grants and 23 Program Grants were selected from a total of over 700 original letters of intent and 94 subsequently invited full applications.

Tobias Bollenbach, a German born in 1978, studied physics at the University of Göttingen and performed his master’s studies in nuclear astrophysics at Michigan State University. Bollenbach then switched fields to biological physics. In his PhD work he developed theoretical approaches to describe the transport of morphogens in tissues. As a post-doctoral fellow he performed experimental and theoretical studies on microbial gene regulation in response to drugs.

In 2010 Tobias Bollenbach joined IST Austria as Assistant Professor. Bollenbach and his group research how cells, ranging from those in the tissues of multi-cellular organisms to single-celled microbes, respond to signals in the environment by modifying the expression of their genes. The long-term goal is to gain a deeper, more quantitative understanding of the relation between the signals present in the cell’s environment and the information processing and other events which they trigger inside cells.

The President of IST Austria Thomas Henzinger congratulated Bollenbach on his success: “This is excellent news and a confirmation for Tobias’s work and IST Austria’s attraction for promising young scientists. This can be deduced from the list of HFSP grantees so far at IST Austria. Michael Sixt and Gašper Tkačik were awarded with Program Grants, Harald Janovjak and Călin Guet with Young Investigator Grants.”