Martin Wühr, Ph.D.

Martin obtained his PhD in Systems Biology from Harvard. Together with Tim Mitchison, he studied how the cell division machinery adapts to the drastically changing cell size in early vertebrate embryos. They proposed a model in which dynein pulling on bulk cytoplasm centers nascent spindles and orients them along the long axis of the cell, thereby explaining the canonical embryonic cleavage patterns. For his Postdoc, Martin joined the laboratories of Steven Gygi, a leader in quantitative proteomics, and Marc Kirschner, who is interested in the description of cellular and developmental processes on the systems level. Martin developed new methods for quantitative proteomics and applied them to investigate nucleocytoplasmic segregation and developmental processes in the early embryo. The proteome scale perspective provided new insight into the partitioning of proteins between nucleus and cytoplasm and overall strategy for RNA and protein regulation in the embryo.Martin Wühr