Horst Joachim Schirra's Biography

Horst Joachim Schirra, Research Fellow, The University of Queensland

Dr Schirra is an NMR spectroscopist with more than 20 years of experience and one of the leaders of NMR-based metabolomics in Australia. He studied Chemistry at the Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, and received his PhD in Biochemistry from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich (Switzerland), where he elucidated the solution structure of one of the major proteins catalysing protein folding in E. coli. In 1999, he joined the University of Queensland, and in 2005 was awarded a prestigious Queensland Smart State Fellowship. In 2009 Dr Schirra became an independent Lecturer in the School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences at UQ, and in 2012 he joined UQ's Centre for Advanced Imaging, where he leads a multidisciplinary research program in metabolic regulation and systems biology. The focus of Dr Schirra's scientific career from early scientific education to independent researcher has been to develop research skills and expertise in a number of areas at the interface between biology and chemistry, with the view that important biological problems require a multidisciplinary approach to reach a solution. His main field of research is Metabolic and Structural Systems Biology. Dr Schirra uses the potential that NMR-based metabolomics offers as a platform technology for characterising the metabolome and investigating the impact of disease and environmental change. Specifically, his current research focuses on elucidating the basic principles of metabolic regulation and the role it plays in fundamental biological processes, in the development of disease, and in the connection between genotype and phenotype. Part of this research theme is to push the boundaries of NMR-based metabolomics by integrating the technique with genomic and proteomic methods and by expanding the toolbox of computational methods to analyse metabolomic data. Dr Schirra is Board Member of the Australian and New Zealand Society for Magnetic Resonance (ANZMAG) and editorial board member of International Scholarly Research Notices and Structural Biology.