Prof. Dr. Thomas Jenuwein
Curriculum Vitae
Thomas Jenuwein was born in 1956 in Lohr am Main, Germany and earned his PhD in molecular biology in 1987 at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and Heidelberg University, conducting research on fos oncogenes in the laboratory of Rolf Müller. From 1987 to 1993, Thomas Jenuwein was a postdoctoral researcher with Rudolf Grosschedl at the University of California, San Francisco, USA, where he studied immunoglobulin heavy chain (IgH) enhancers. As an independent group leader from 1993 to 2002 and later as a senior scientist from 2002 to 2008 at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna (IMP), Austria, he focused his research on chromatin regulation. In 2003, he completed his habilitation in molecular biology at the University of Vienna, Austria. Thomas Jenuwein served as Director and Scientific Member at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg (MPI-IE) from 2008 to 2024. Since 2025, he has been Emeritus.
Research Interests
Thomas Jenuwein conducts research in the field of epigenetics, investigating various mechanisms and molecules to decode chromatin-dependent gene regulation. His goal is to identify molecular mechanisms that initiate and maintain heterochromatic domains in mammals. He discovered the first histone lysine methyltransferase and demonstrated that histone lysine methylation is a key epigenetic modification in eukaryotic chromatin.
Selected Awards
Thomas Jenuwein was elected as a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in 2002, a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 2017, and an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2019. In 2003, he received the Sir Hans Krebs Medal from the Federation of European Biochemical Societies (FEBS), and in 2007, he was awarded the Erwin Schrödinger Prize by the Austrian Academy of Sciences.