News Archive
CEF welcomes Michaela Müller-McNicoll to Frankfurt
March 2014. Biologist Michaela Müller-McNicoll starts her new position as Junior Professor in RNA Regulation in Higher Eukaryotes this month. She is passionate about all aspects of RNA biology and is looking forward to continuing her cutting-edge research in a strong RNA community. Michaela Müller-McNicoll is excited by the breadth of research topics that are tackled in the CEF. Particularly relevant for her research is the combination of structural biology and high-resolution microscopy available in Frankfurt.
Michaela Müller-McNicoll is married and has a young son. She studied biology at the Humboldt University in Berlin before moving in 2003 to Laval University in Quebec, Canada, to join the group of Barbara Papdopoulou for her Diploma thesis project. Acquiring different scholarships enabled her to continue to work in the same group for her PhD thesis, investigating the mechanisms that control post-transcriptional gene expression in Leishmania, a protozoan parasite that causes a broad spectrum of human diseases. Michaela Müller-McNicoll won several awards for her research, including an award for scientific excellence in molecular parasitology, and her PhD thesis was highlighted as outstanding by Laval University.
Subsequently Michaela Müller-McNicoll returned to Germany in 2010 as an EMBO fellow to start her postdoc in the group of Karla Neugebauer at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden. During her postdoc Michaela Müller-McNicoll studied the regulatory mechanisms of post-transcriptional gene expression in mammalian cells with a focus on regulatory RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) and their roles in early steps of RNA metabolism, such as pre-mRNA splicing and mRNA export.
In Frankfurt Michaela Müller-McNicoll plans to combine her expertise gained from PhD and postdoctoral training and, focusing on the SR protein family of regulatory RBPs, she wants to understand how RBPs connect sequential and non-sequential steps of RNA metabolism. Using a combination of cell biology methods, structural biology and high-throughput sequencing approaches she wants to gain insights into the assembly pathways of messenger ribonucleoprotein particles (mRNPs).
Contact
Michaela Müller-McNicoll
Dept. of Biosciences
Riedberg Campus
Goethe-University Frankfurt
Max-von-Laue-Str. 13
60438 Frankfurt am Main
mueller-mcnicoll@bio.uni-frankfurt.de