María Teresa Pisabarro appointed as “Außerplanmäßige Professorin” (APL) at the TU Dresden

Research group leader María Teresa Pisabarro was appointed as an “außerplanmäßige Professorin” of CMCB/BIOTEC, TU Dresden. Professor Pisabarro is an expert in structural computational biology. Her research group develops and uses state-of-the-art computational approaches to investigate structure and function of macromolecules for rational engineering and de novo design. The title comes as a recognition for many years of outstanding research and teaching performance.

María Teresa Pisabarro and her research group take advantage of the existing knowledge on the relationship between the structure and function of biomacromolecules to predict and intervene with the molecular interactions of proteins, DNA, sugars, and small molecules. The researchers in the Pisabarro group are experts in applying structure-based computational approaches to rationally engineer molecules for a variety of biotechnological and pharmacological applications. That means designing new molecules from scratch (de novo design) equipping them with customized properties or modifying existing ones to improve or change their function. The group works in close cooperation with experimentalists from different scientific disciplines.

Professor Pisabarro is one of the lecturers in the “Molecular Bioengineering” and the “Nanobiophysics” Master’s programs, which are carried out by the Center for Molecular and Cellular Bioengineering (CMCB), TU Dresden. She is responsible for the Structural and Computational Biology lecture course and gives lectures in the Proteomics and Protein Engineering courses.

"Mayte has done an outstanding work in structural bioinformatics. She continuously pursued her line of research and collaborated with many high-profile research groups. This title recognizes her contribution to science and the community. We are looking forward to the years of research and teaching ahead," said Prof. Michael Schroeder, managing director of the Biotechnology Center (BIOTEC).

María Teresa Pisabarro studied pharmacology at the Complutense University of Madrid, Spain. She completed her PhD in structural and computational biology at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany. Her thesis work was funded by a prestigious PhD fellowship from Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds. She worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the EMBL and the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), USA. In 1998 she became a group leader in protein engineering at Genentech Inc. She moved to Dresden in 2002, joining Max Planck Institute for Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) as a visiting scientist. Since 2004 she leads the structural bioinformatics research group at the BIOTEC.