Lectures and seminars CCK-lecture & What is life? The Future of Biology: Imaging the molecular processes of cell division across scales
Speaker: Jan Ellenberg, Director, Science for Life Laboratory, Stockholm
Host: Ingemar Ernberg, MTC, Biomedicum and CCK
Abstract
The rapid development of new imaging technologies allows unprecedented insights into the molecular machinery inside living cells and organisms. For the first time, light and electron microscopy have molecular sensitivity and resolving power in situ, and, if used together, can connect structural detail with molecular dynamics of the whole cell. Aided by machine learning driven image analysis powered by open sharing of image data, this provides unprecedented opportunities for new insights into the molecular mechanisms that drive life’s core functions at the scale of the cell.
Bio
Jan Ellenberg is director for the SciLifeLab since 2024, and for the Wallenberg National Program for Data-Driven Life Science. He is professor of Cell Biology and Biophysics, Karolinska Institutet and at the Royal Institute of Technology. He stared his career in Hamburg and and made a Ph.D. in biochemistry at Freie Universität Berlin, made a post doc.at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, US and then moved to EMBL in Heidelberg where he ended up heading the Cell Biology and Biophysics Unit 2010-24.
He received a honorary doctorate at Stockholm University and at Åbo Akademi University. He is elected as a member of the German National Academy of Sciences, of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) and of the Academia Europaea.
He was appointed Advanced Investigator by European Research Council (ERC) in 2018 and 2024.
Email: jan.ellenberg@scilifelab.se
Selected publications
1. Beckwith KS, Brunner A, Morero NR, Jungmann R, Ellenberg J. 2025. Nanoscale 3D DNA tracing reveals the mechanism of self-organization of mitotic chromosomes. Cell 188: 2656 – 2669.
2. Otsuka S, Tempkin JOB, Politi AZ, Rybina A, Hossain MJ, Kueblbeck M, Callegari A, Koch B, Morero NR, Sali A, Ellenberg J. 2023. A quantitative map of nuclear pore assembly reveals two distinct mechanisms. Nature 613:575-581.
3. Cai Y, Hossain MJ, Heriche JK, Politi AZ, Walther N, Koch B, Wachsmuth M, Nijmeijer B, Kueblbeck M, Martinic M, Ladurner R, Alexander S, Peters JM, Ellenberg J. 2018. Experimental and computational framework for a dynamic protein atlas of human cell division. Nature 561:411-5.