Thomas Weidemann

Thomas Weidemann studied Biology and Physics at the University of Freiburg i. Br. and the University of Heidelberg, in the southwest of Germany. He did his PhD with Jörg Langowski at the German Cancer Research Institute, where he studied chromatin with a combination of confocal microscopy methods, mainly fluorescence correlation spectroscopy. He measured for the fist time calibrated nucleosome density maps, which helped to understand diffusion and site accessibility within the nuclear compartment. In 2003 he joined as a postdoctoral fellow the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research in Vienna, Austria. There, he was involved in assay development for a novel compound screening approach and became interested in fundamental aspects of cytokine signalling. To follow up on cell biophysics, he returned to academia into the group of Petra Schwille, first at the Max Planck Institute for Cell Biology and Genetics and later at the BIOTEC as part of the Technical University Dresden. Since 2008, he holds a permanent position as an assistant lecturer in biophysics, teaches in master courses, leads seminars, and supervises students. His research is currently focused on a biophysical characterization of the Interleukin-4 signalling machinery.