Prof. Tobias Langenhan Leipzig University, Germany

Tobias Langenhan heads the Department of General Biochemistry at the Medical Faculty, Leipzig, Germany. His group investigates how adhesion G protein-coupled receptors work at different levels: their main role in organ physiology, their signaling routes, and how effects of their failure impact organ function. His team uses a combination of... read moregenetics, biochemistry, molecular pharmacology, conventional and super-resolution imaging, and bioinformatics to approach the many open questions pertaining to the function of these enigmatic receptor molecules. His group exploits genetic models such as the nematode C. elegans and the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster to clarify molecular rules that govern the operations of adhesion GPCRs. More recently, Tobias Langenhan’s lab has started to include human cancer genomics as a tool to decipher activity signatures of adhesion GPCRs.

Tobias Langenhan completed his medical studies at the University of Würzburg Medical School, Germany, in 2004, and obtained a research-based Dr. med. degree on the functional neuroanatomy of the olfactory system in 2006, also from Würzburg University. Funded through a Wellcome Trust scholarship he moved to the University of Oxford and Somerville College, Oxford, UK, in 2004 where he studied neuroscience and obtained his M.Sc. in 2005. At Magdalen College he continued his doctoral studies on the role of adhesion GPCRs in neurodevelopment and obtained his D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in 2009. Upon his return to Würzburg University, Germany, he established his own lab and widened his scope to the function of adhesion GPCRs and the principles underlying the molecular architecture of the presynapse. In 2016 he became Heisenberg professor at Würzburg University and in the same year moved to Leipzig University to chair the Department of General Biochemistry at the Rudolf Schönheimer Institute of Biochemistry at the Medical Faculty of Leipzig University.

Tobias Langenhan is founder, board member and co-chair of the Adhesion GPCR Consortium and since 2014 spokesperson and coordinator of the DFG Research Unit Consortium ‘Elucidation of adhesion GPCR signaling'. He has received several awards including a Wellcome Trust Prize Scholarship (2004), the Wolfgang Bargmann Prize (2006), and a Heisenberg Professorship from the German Research Foundation (2015).