(Wien, 07 November 2022) Marco Hein starts a §99-(5) Assistant Professorship in Molecular Biology under the tenure-track model at the Medical University of Vienna. The systems biologist comes to Vienna from San Francisco and takes over the management of a research group at the Max Perutz Labs.
As a systems biologist, Marco Hein takes a bird's eye view of biological processes. Many principles of life at the molecular level can only be understood by looking at the sum of all individual parts. His research group is particularly interested in the interactions of viruses with their hosts. Viruses are intracellular parasites that convert host cells into virus factories, exploiting cellular metabolism and repurposing signaling pathways. At the same time, viruses must constantly evade the host's immune system.
To study these processes, Marco Hein and his team use state-of-the-art methods of mass spectrometry-based proteomics and functional genomics. In the long term, a better understanding of the principles of virus-host interactions will help in the development of treatments to combat viral replication, as well as the prevention of an overactive immune response.
Marco Hein studied biochemistry in Tübingen. He obtained his doctorate under the supervision of Matthias Mann at the Max Planck Institute in Martinsried with a thesis on the interaction network of human proteins. He then joined the laboratory of Jonathan Weissman at the University of California, San Francisco, with a postdoctoral fellowship from the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO). There, he studied human cytomegalovirus and its interactions with its host using CRISPR screening and single-cell sequencing. Most recently, he was a Fellow at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub in San Francisco, studying host factors of SARS-CoV-2.