Boris Greber's Biography

Boris Greber, Researcher, Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine

Boris Greber is an independent research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine and the Chemical Genomics Centre of the Max Planck Society in Germany. Previously, he pursued his postdoctoral and Ph.D. studies at two Max Planck Institutes (in Münster and Berlin, respectively). His research interests comprise the control of early fate decisions in human pluripotent stem cells, self-renewal, cellular reprogramming, directed differentiation, and cardiac disease modeling using patient-derived as well as genetically engineered hiPS cells. In basic research on the pluripotency of hES cells, he has contributed to an enhanced understanding of how major signaling pathways regulate the expression of key genes involved in self-renewal or driving early differentiation into defined cell fates like neuroectoderm or cardiac mesoderm. More recently, he has developed a cell line-independent platform for high-efficiency cardiac differentiation that now forms the basis for dissecting molecular mechanisms driving this process. Using refined differentiation procedures, he is also pursuing genetic cardiac disease modeling, with an emphasis on investigating arrhythmia phenotypes on electrode chips in a cardiac subtype-specific manner.