Jurg Bahler's Biography

Jurg Bahler, Professor, University College London

Dr. Jürg Bähler completed his PhD at the University of Bern (Switzerland). After short stays as Research Associate in Japan and Switzerland, he worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow with John Pringle at the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill, USA) and with Paul Nurse at Imperial Cancer Research Fund (London, UK). In 2000, Dr. Bähler joined the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (Hinxton, UK) as a Group Leader, and in 2009 was appointed as a Professor of Systems Biology at University College London. His laboratory studies genome regulation during cellular proliferation, quiescence, and ageing using fission yeast (Schizosaccharomyces pombe) as a model system. They apply multiple genetic, computational and genome-wide approaches for systems-level understanding of regulatory processes and complex relationships between genotype, phenotype, and environment, including roles of genome variation and evolution, transcriptome regulation, and non-coding RNAs. For example, they helped to pioneer the RNA-seq method to analyse transcriptomes at unprecedented detail (Wilhelm et al., Nature, 2008), analysed absolute cellular numbers for all RNAs and most proteins in proliferating and non-dividing cells (Marguerat et al., Cell 2012), and studied the genomic and phenotypic diversity of wild fission yeast strains (Jeffares et al., Nat Genet, 2015).