Prof. Kikuë Tachibana, PhD
Director
Kikuë Tachibana was educated in Austria, Japan and the UK. She studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge University (1997-2000) and spent a formative research gap year in Kim Nasmyth’s lab at the Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP), Vienna (2001). Kikuë returned to Cambridge for her PhD research to work on DNA replication and its translational applications in cancer diagnostics under the supervision of Ronald Laskey at the Hutchison/Medical Research Council Research Centre (2001-2005). She devoted her postdoctoral research to studying the causes of maternal age-related egg aneuploidy in Kim Nasmyth’s laboratory in the Department of Biochemistry, University of Oxford (2006-2011). Kikuë started her independent research group at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (IMBA), Vienna, with a focus on understanding how chromatin is reorganized and reprogrammed in the early embryo (2011-2021). She was recruited as Director to the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry and established a Department of Totipotency (2019). Kikuë is fascinated by the molecular mechanisms of totipotency reprogramming that underlie the start of life of multicellular organisms.