Prof. Dr. Patrick Cramer

Max Planck Insti­tute for Multi­dis­ci­pli­nary Sciences, Göttin­gen site

Patrick Cramer is Presi­dent of the Max Planck Society (since 2023), 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. He also received the Shaw Prize (2023), the Gregori Aminoff Prize (2022), and the Louis Jeantet Prize for Medicine (2021). He is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences (Leopold­ina) and the Ameri­can National Academy of Sciences.