Biocatalysis

Dirk Tischler studied Applied Natural Science with focal points on Environmental Microbiology and Biotechnology as well as Environmental Analytics at TU Bergakademie Freiberg (Germany) and graduated in 2007. He continued in Freiberg with his doctoral studies on styrene monooxygenases and related enzymes and completed his dissertation with distinction in 2012. For this he was awarded with two pre-doctoral scholarships from the Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt and Fulbright and he had two international research stays in Biochemistry Laboratories with Willem van Berkel at Wageningen University and George Gassner at San Francisco State University. The doctoral thesis was awarded with two prizes. He continued as a group leader in the field of industrial biotechnology with emphasis on the prediction of biocatalysts and pathways from (meta)genomes of soil bacteria, especially actinobacteria. This includes three prestigious grants for his group projects GETGEOWEB (ESF), BakSolEx (BMBF), and ChemBioCat (NRW). 2018 he became W1 Professor and was tenured in 2019 to Full Professor for Microbial Biotechnology at the Ruhr University Bochum. He focuses on the identification and application of novel biocatalysts, mostly related to redox biochemistry.