Prof. Stefan Diez is the New Director of the B CUBE

As of January 1, 2024, Prof. Stefan Diez is the new director of the B CUBE – Center for Molecular Bioengineering. He replaces Prof. Yael Politi, who led the institute since 2022. Prof. Politi will continue to support B CUBE as deputy director.

Stefan Diez is a research group leader and professor at B CUBE - Center for Molecular Bioengineering of TU Dresden. His interdisciplinary research group focuses on understanding how cargo is transported inside cells and how these principles can be applied to nanotechnology. To answer this question, the Diez group develops and applies a variety of biophysical methods, including microscopy and image processing techniques.

"It is a great honor for me to take on the director's role," says Prof. Stefan Diez. "I am pleased to succeed Prof. Yael Politi, who successfully led the institute for the last two years and will now support our team as the deputy director. My goal is to advance the mission of B CUBE as an internationally recognized research center aiming to capture potentially useful natural phenomena, to elucidate them on a multi-scale mechanistic level, and to translate these findings into synthetic materials using biologically inspired design concepts."

Stefan Diez completed his PhD in physics at the Technical University of Berlin in 2000. After a research stay at the University of Washington in Seattle (USA), he moved to Dresden and became head of Optical Technology Development at the Max-Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG). In 2004, he started his own BMBF-funded research group at MPI-CBG, focusing on molecular transport in cell biology and nanotechnology. His group moved to the B CUBE in 2010, when he became DFG Heisenberg Professor for BioNanoTools at TU Dresden. Stefan Diez was awarded an ERC Starting Grant (2009-2014) and has been elected Max Planck Fellow (2019-2028) as well as Fellow of the Max Planck School Matter to Life (2021-2025).

Stefan Diez previously served as B CUBE director (2012-2015), managing director of the Center for Molecular and Cellular Bioengineering (CMCB) (2018-2022), and co-speaker of the Cluster of Excellence Physics of Life (2019-2021). Since 2012, he acts as vice-dean and elected ombudsperson of the Dresden International Graduate School for Biomedicine and Bioengineering (DIGS-BB).