Grubmüller, Helmut, Prof. Dr.

Professor, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences

• 1994 Dr. rer nat. (Physics), Technical University of Munich
• 1997 EMBO fellow at the Institute for Molecular Biology and Biophysics, Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich, Switzerland
• 1998 - 2003 Head of the Theoretical Molecular Biophysics Group at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen
• 2002 Habilitation & Venia Legendi for Physics, Georg August University of Göttingen, Germany
• 2003 Associate Professor for Biomolecular Sciences at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
• Since 2003 Director and Head of the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Department at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen
• Since 2005 Honorary Professor for Physics at the University of Göttingen
• 2010–2011 Executive Director, Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen

Major Research Interests
The question 'How do proteins work?' is our driving force. We study biomolecular dynamics and function by atomistic molecular dynamics and QM/MM simulations. Emphasis is on protein function, as well as on protein/DNA/RNA interactions.
Available projects address nuclear pore transport, the ribosome, molecular motors such as the F-ATPase (Fig. 2), protein unfolding as well as the interaction with radiation with focus on single molecules, typically in close collaboration with experimental groups. The simulation of single molecule AFM experiments by force probe techniques helps us to reveal mechanisms of protein function involving mechanical stress such as the muscular force sensor Titin Kinase, and so do improved methods to calculate thermodynamic quantities from simulations (Fig. 2). We are continuously advancing our simulation techniques and scalability on massively parallel computers. The group of ca. 15 PhD students and postdocs shares a strong background mainly in physics and scientific computing, but also in chemistry and biology. We enjoy exclusive access to a high-performance linux cluster of ca. 20.000 processor cores and ca. 1250 GPUs (Figure 3).




Homepage Department / Research Group
https://www.mpinat.mpg.de/grubmueller

ORCID: 0000-0002-3270-3144