Matthias Hentze

Matthias Hentze (born 1960) is a German scientist and physician who has directed the European Molecular Biology Laboratory since 2013. He studied medicine at several British universities and at the University of Münster, qualifying in 1984 and taking his MD with a dissertation on glycosylation in lysosomal enzyme expression. After postdoctoral work at the National Institutes of Health in the United States he joined the laboratory in Heidelberg in 1989 as an independent group leader, habilitated at Heidelberg in 1990 and became dean of its international PhD programme in 1996. He co-founded the Molecular Medicine Partnership Unit with Andreas Kulozik in 2002, became associate director of the laboratory and professor of molecular medicine at the University of Heidelberg in 2005, and chaired its first bioethics committee from 2004 to 2020.