Congratulations to MPUSP affiliate Gita Naseri for receiving a four-year €1.3 million euro grant by the Volkswagen Stiftung for her research project on fungal bio-materials production!
March 13, 2025
On 13 March, 2025, Dr Gita Naseri, Emmy Noether Group Leader at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and MPUSP affiliate, in collaboration with Hannes Hinneburg from the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Polymer Research IAP (Potsdam-Golm), was awarded a four-year grant of €1.3 million by the Volkswagen Foundation for the MyPro project. The MyPro team advances the sustainable production of mycelium-based materials by integrating synthetic biology-driven bioengineering methodologies and developing scalable, semi-automated production processes. Beyond their role in food production, recent advances have enabled the use of fungi's highly interconnected "root" structures—mycelium—to create sustainable materials such as insulation, packaging, leather alternatives, building materials, and regenerative biomaterials. However, economic production, scalability and technical constraints remain significant challenges for widespread adoption. To address these challenges, the MyPro team at MPUSP and HU is leveraging a CRISPR-derived toolbox for gene expression regulation and genome editing to control the production of extracellular matrix components. Concurrently, the Fraunhofer lab is developing a scalable, semi-automated production process for fungal materials. For more information on her laboratory, click here.
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Congratulations to MPUSP affiliate Gita Naseri who is starting her Emmy Noether research group at the Institute for Biology at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin!
AUGUST 1, 2024
On 1 September 2021, Dr Gita Naseri joined the laboratories of Marc Erhardt and Emmanuelle Charpentier as a postdoc at the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens. On 26 September 2023, Gita Naseri was awarded a six-year grant by the Emmy Noether Program of the German Research Foundation (DFG). Congratulations to Gita, who has now recruited her first laboratory members and is starting her own independent laboratory at the Institute for Biology at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. For more information on her laboratory, click here.
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Gita Naseri awarded a six-year grant by the Emmy Noether Program of the German Research Foundation (DFG)
SEPTEMBER 26, 2023
Dr. Gita Naseri (Emmanuelle Charpentier’s laboratory at the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens (MPUSP) and Marc Erhardt’s laboratory at the Institute for Biology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) has been awarded a six-year grant by the Emmy Noether Program of the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)).
The Emmy Noether Programme has been established by the DFG to offer exceptionally qualified early career researchers the chance to qualify for a professorship at a university by leading an independent junior research group for a period of six years. The Emmy Noether grant awarded to Gita Naseri entitled „COMPLATn - A comprehensive platform for sustainable biosynthesis of rare natural products in Pichia pastoris” aims to create a new avenue for the biomanufacturing of rare natural products that control microbial diseases and cancers in microbial cells by employing cutting-edge genetic engineering technologies. For this project, Gita Naseri is receiving a total funding of almost 2.6 million EUR over a 6-year period.
After studying biology in Iran, Gita Naseri received her doctoral degree in synthetic biology from the University of Potsdam in 2018. In 2019, she embarked on her PostDoc research journey at the Institute for Chemistry at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. In 2021, she joined Marc Erhardt's laboratory at the Institute for Biology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Since then, she has been working as a PostDoc at Emmanuelle Charpentier’s laboratory at MPUSP and Marc Erhardt’s laboratory at the Institute for Biology of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Gita Naseri’s work has been recognized by several awards, including the NNPDF Fellowship award from the National Niemann-Pick Disease Foundation (USA) and the Go-Bio initial funding program of the German Ministry for Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF), Germany).
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