Manfred Schartl

Class of 2015-16

University of Würzburg, Germany
Leopoldina, National Academy of Sciences of Germany
Prince Hitachi Prize, Comparative Oncology, Japan

Manfred Schartl is best known for explaining the molecular–genetic basis of cancer formation—especially malignant melanoma—by using fish and other nonmammalian models and for translating basic evolutionary research into discoveries with clear and direct impacts on human health.

His work has aided the understanding of sex determination as well as the functional and evolutionary consequences of gene duplication. He is at the forefront of all fish-based models of human disease, with implications for developmental disorders, aging, and cancers.

Schartl studied biology and chemistry from 1973 to 1978 at the University of Giessen in Germany, resulting in a doctoral degree in genetics. He became a lecturer at Giessen in 1983 and team leader of a research group at the Gene Center of the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany, in 1985. In 1991, he became a professor at the Biocenter of the University of Würzburg, where he now serves as head of the Department of Physiological Chemistry. He is a founder of the biomedicine program at Würzburg.

For the last thirty-five years, Schartl has studied the molecular genetics and biochemistry of cancer, with an emphasis on malignant melanoma. He also has explored the mechanisms that guide the molecular-developmental decisions in embryos to become male or female. Both topics are linked by common molecular and developmental methods and by the evolutionary and comparative approach to using fish as models for understanding human physiology and diseases.

Schartl is vice chairman of the Rudolf Virchow Center, the university’s research center for experimental medicine. He is an adjunct professor for experimental cancer research in the Department of Molecular Biology at the University of Bergen in Norway. Schartl has chaired the scientific advisory board for the Center of Molecular Biology at the University of Göttingen since 2005 and the Sars Centre for Molecular Marine Biology in Bergen since 1999.

He is member of the Leopoldina, the National Academy of Sciences of Germany.

Honors include the Heisenberg Award from the German Research Foundation, the Jenkinson Lecture of the Oxford University in 1991, the NUSS Annual Lecturer and Guest Professorship at the National University of Singapore 2015, and the Ray Chaudhuri Lecture at the University of Varanasi in India in 2011. He received an honorary doctoral degree from the University of Bergen in 2004 and Japan’s Prince Hitachi Prize for Comparative Oncology in 2007.

He served as president of the German Genetics Society from 2009 to 2011 and has served as a member of its advisory board since 1999.

Schartl has published more than 370 peer-reviewed articles.

As a TIAS Faculty Fellow, Schartl will collaborate with faculty–researchers from the Department of Biology in the College of Science, as well as faculty–researchers from the Health Science Center and the College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences.As a TIAS Faculty Fellow, Schartl will collaborate with faculty–researchers from the Department of Biology in the College of Science as well as from the Health Science Center and the College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences.

For more updated information: https://www.bio.tamu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/CV-M-Schartl-English-290119.pdf

Students

Mateo Garcia – 2017-18