Professor Benesh Joseph Receives Rise up! Grant from the Boehringer Ingelheim Foundation
Experimental physicist at Freie Universität Berlin awarded 600,000 euros from the Boehringer Ingelheim Foundation
№ 091/2024 from Apr 30, 2024
The Boehringer Ingelheim Foundation has awarded 600,000 euros to Benesh Joseph through its prestigious Rise up! program. With this funding, Joseph and his team will investigate how biomolecular machines convert external signals into mechanical work under laboratory and cellular conditions. To this end, they will develop and apply electron spin resonance spectroscopy-based techniques and combine these with theoretical approaches. This research will enable a deeper understanding of how directionality can be controlled in a targeted manner and how protein conformational changes can be reversed. This has the ability to facilitate the development of novel antibiotics and highly efficient enzymes for industrial applications.
Benesh Joseph has been a professor of molecular biophysics at Freie Universität Berlin’s Department of Physics since March 2023. He has received multiple accolades for his research, including the Adolf Messer Prize (2017), the German Biophysical Society’s Young Investigator Award (2018), membership of the Johanna Quandt Young Academy at Goethe (2018), and funding through the Emmy Noether Program (2019).
About the Rise up! Program
The Rise up! program is aimed at supporting outstanding and exceptionally creative scientists in the fields of biology, chemistry, and medicine who have accepted their first appointment to an associate professorship at a German university. Rise up! empowers these early-career researchers to establish and carry out innovative research programs that may have a lasting impact on their field.
About the Foundation
The Boehringer Ingelheim Foundation is an independent, non-profit organization that is committed to the promotion of basic research in medicine, biology, chemistry, and pharmacy. It was established in 1977 by Hubertus Liebrecht (1931–1991), a member of the shareholder family of the Boehringer Ingelheim company. Through programs such as Plus 3, Exploration Grants, and Rise up!, the Boehringer Ingelheim Foundation supports excellent scientists during critical stages of their careers. It also awards the Heinrich Wieland Prize for internationally renowned scientists, as well as awards for early career scientists in Germany. In addition, the foundation funds institutional projects in Germany, such as the Institute of Molecular Biology (IMB) and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg.
Further Information
Joseph working group at the Department of Physics, Freie Universität Berlin: https://www.physik.fu-berlin.de/en/einrichtungen/ag/ag-joseph/index.html
Contact
Prof. Dr. Benesh Joseph, Department of Physics, Freie Universität Berlin, Email: benesh.joseph@fu-berlin.de