Florian studied biochemistry at the FU Berlin and Harvard University. After completing his diploma thesis as a DAAD foreign exchange scholar with Pamela Silver in functional genomics using ChIP-Chip technology he went to Cambridge to undertake a PhD with Carol Robinson. He stayed on as a post-doc, and his interests continue to lie in developing mass spectrometry as a tool for studying protein assembly architecture and dynamics. During his time in Cambridge he got involved in studying the sHSPs, primarily in assessing the temperature-dependent rearrangements which they undergo, and how this enables them to recognise and bind client proteins in extremely polydisperse chaperone:client complexes. Florian is now a Sir Henry Wellcome Fellow, based at the Institute for Systems Biology at ETH Zurich.
(May 2007 - Feb 2011)