Michael Hiller, joint research group leader at the MPI-CBG and the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, receives the German Life Science Award 2013 together with Shirley Knauer of the Centre for Medical Biotechnology at the Duisburg-Essen University. The award comes with 50,000 Euros and acknowledges Hiller's outstanding work in the field of bioinformatics.
Michael Hiller's group develops computational approaches to study phenotype-genotype associations using the power of comparative and evolutionary genomics, followed by experimental verifications. By comparing the genomes of various species - like for instance apes and humans - they try to understand how molecular and morphological phenotypic diversity is encoded in the genome.
Michael Hiller, aged 35, studied Medical Computer Science in Leipzig and did his PhD in Jena and Freiburg in 2006. He worked as a postdoc at Freiburg University and at Stanford University. He started his joint research group at the MPI-CBG and the MPI-PKS in 2011.
The German Life Science Award is granted to distinguished young scientists by the Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (GBM) for the first time in 2013. The award kindly donated by Roche, is endowed with 50,000 Euros - for outstanding scientific achievements in the field of Life Sciences.