Nediljko Budisa

Ned Budisa is Professor of Biocatalysis at the Technical University of Berlin and holder of the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair (CRC) for Chemical Synthetic Biology at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. Ned Budisa was educated at the University of Zagreb in Croatia and received his Ph.D. in 1997 for research under the direction of Nobel laureate Robert Huber at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, Munich. After a brief postdoc with Luis Moroder and Robert Huber at the same institute, Ned habilitated in the summer of 2005 at the Institute of Chemistry at the Technical University in Munich. At the same time, he remained a research assistant at the Max Planck Institute. Before moving to Berlin in 2010, Ned was head of the Independent Junior Research Group "Molecular Biotechnology". He was full professor of Biocatalysis at the Institute of Chemistry until the end of 2018, when he accepted the Tier 1 CRC position in Manitoba. Ned’s research interests lie in the development of in vivo methods for introducing genetically encoded protein modifications into individual proteins, complex protein structures and entire proteomes with the goal of producing synthetic cells. He is considered a pioneer in the field of genetic code engineering. His contributions to this field have been recognized in earlier phases (BioRegio Award, 1998, BioFuture Award, 2004) of his career and recently (Publication Award of the German Chemical Society, 2017 and Innovation Awards 2018). Ned is also actively involved in public discourse to anticipate, assess and communicate the social, ethical and philosophical implications of these scientific and technological achievements.