Petra Schwille

Petra Schwille (born 25 January 1968 in Sindelfingen ) is a German professor and a researcher in the area of biophysics. Since 2011, she has been a director of the Department of Cellular and Molecular Biophysics at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany. She is known for her ground-laying work in the field of fluorescence cross-correlation spectroscopy, and numerous contributions on model membranes. Her current research focuses around bottom-up approaches to building an artificial cell within a broader area of synthetic biology. In 2010, Schwille received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize.

Education Schwille graduated with a Diploma in physics from the University of Göttingen in 1993. She worked toward her doctoral degree in physics at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany, and received her degree from Technical University of Braunschweig in 1996, with a thesis on fluorescence cross-correlation spectroscopy.

Career Schwille worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University in 1997, and returned to the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen to a research group leader position in 1999.

Schwille developed the "two-photon cross-correlation spectroscopy" method with which fundamental cellular processes can be explored.

Awards and honors

Awards 2001: Lecturer award by the German Chemical Industry Fund 2010: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation (DFG) 2013: Suffrage Science Award, MRC-CSC, London

Memberships and fellowships

2005: Max-Planck-Fellow of the MPI for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics 2011: Member of the German Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech) 2013: Member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities 2013: Member of EMBO 2015: Honorary Fellow of the Royal Microscopical Society 2017: Fellow of the Biophysical Society 2018: Member of the Academia Europaea