Prof. Dr. Patrick Cramer

Max Planck Insti­tute for Multi­dis­ci­pli­nary Sciences, Göttin­gen site

Patrick Cramer is direc­tor at the Max Planck Insti­tute for Multi­dis­ci­pli­nary Sciences and honorary profes­sor at the Univer­sity of Göttingen.

He studies macro­mol­e­c­u­lar complexes of the nucleus and functional genomics of gene regula­tion. He is one of the world's leading experts on the mecha­nisms of gene transcrip­tion in eukary­otic cells. He resolved the three-dimen­sional struc­ture of RNA polymerase II, discov­ered mecha­nisms under­ly­ing gene regula­tion at the origin of genes and devel­oped methods to track the metab­o­lism of mRNA in cells. More recently, he is working on the devel­op­ment of methods to visual­ize and function­ally analyze the transcrip­tion of a natural DNA template called chromatin.

Patrick Cramer has been awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Founda­tion (DFG), the Ernst Scher­ing Prize, the Ernst Jung Prize, the Otto Warburg Medal and the Federal Cross of Merit.