Carl-Philipp Heisenberg is professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA). He is leading the project Cytoplasmic Self-Organization in Early Animal Development.
Born in Germany, Carl-Philipp Heisenberg is a developmental biologist who studied biology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich and in 1997completed his doctorate in the group of Nobel laureate Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard at the Max Planck Institute for Biology in Tübingen, Germany. In 2001, he became research group leader and Emmy Noether Junior Professor at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden. In 2010, Heisenberg was appointed professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) in Klosterneuburg. He has been a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina since 2015. He received an ERC Advanced Grant in 2017 from the European Research Council and, in the same year, the Würdigungspreis from Lower Austria. In 2018, he joined the Board of Reviewing Editors of the journal Science and, in 2019, received the Carus Medal from the Leopoldina.
Research Focus
Heisenberg’s research focuses on a common and fundamental principle in cell and developmental biology — the transformation of seemingly unstructured clusters of cells into highly elaborate shapes. To gain insights into critical processes by which the developing organism takes shape, Heisenberg and his research group are investigating gastrulation in zebrafish and ascidians, a highly conserved process in which a seemingly unstructured blastula is transformed into an organized embryo.
Their interdisciplinary approach employs a combination of genetic, cell biological, biochemical and biophysical tools to address how the interplay between the physical processes driving cell and tissue morphogenesis and the gene regulatory pathways determining cell fate specification control gastrulation. Insights derived from this work may have implications for the study of wound healing and cancer biology, as immune and cancer cells share many morphogenetic properties of embryonic cells.