Photo:

Tobias Warnecke

Curriculum Vitae

  • Education:

    School: Albert-Einstein-Gymnasium Buchholz, Germany (1996-2003); Undergraduate: St Hugh’s College, University of Oxford (2003-2006); PhD: University of Bath (2006-2010)

  • Qualifications:

    B.A. & PhD

  • Work History:

    Centre for Genomic Regulation, Barcelona (2010-2013)

  • Current Job:

    I’m a research group leader at the MRC Clinical Sciences Centre in London

  • Employer:

    Imperial College London

  • Favourite Thing:

    Having an idea for a new experiment (often followed by learning that somebody else has already done it…)

  • Me and my work

    I use a computer to study how genomes and proteins change through evolution.

    Read more

    One of the things I’m really interested are chaperones. They are a special class of proteins that help other proteins fold properly. A protein starts off just as a string of amino acids, and that string needs to fold into a 3D structure for the protein to work. Sometimes, that folding goes wrong. For example, when cells are heated up, proteins have a tendency to lose their shape. Chaperones can help these proteins recover their shape after this heat treatment.

    Sometimes that chaperone assistance has an unexpected side effect: when mutations happen that destabilize the structure of the chaperone client, they are effectively invisible because the chaperone can bail its client out. In some odd bacteria, almost all proteins have really crappy structures but the cell is stuffed full of chaperones that hold things together. Like a broomstick that’s broken in several places – you can still use it when you wrap enough duct tape around it.

    So one of the things I do is compare genomes with each other to see what effect chaperones have on how stable all the other proteins are.

  • My Typical Day

    Read – drink coffee – write – drink coffe – repeat

    Read more

    I just started my own lab so recently I have been doing lots of things I had never done before: write job adverts to hire people, fill in health and safety forms (urgh…), or discuss with my colleagues how we’re gonna organize the lab.

    But normally I start my day catching up with the latest bits of research in my field, and then spend most of the day analyzing data, writing emails to collaborators to coordinate the research we do together, or working on a manuscript I want to publish in the scientific literature.

    It’s fair to say that I sit in front of the computer a lot – but what I do is actually quite varied rather than the same repetitive task over and over again.

  • What I'd do with the money

    I’ll give it to my students to plan a public engagement event together

    Read more

    Having just started my lab, I figured this would be a great way to get my new students involved in communicating our research to the public but also to work on something together, brainstorm, develop a project, and eventually carry it out. They should be able to decide themselves how best to use the money, so I don’t know yet what the concrete project is going to be.

  • My Interview

    • How would you describe yourself in 3 words?

      Curious, considerate, and silly (according to my girlfriend)

      Who is your favourite singer or band?

      Arctic Monkeys, Beck, Wir sind Helden

      What's your favourite food?

      Pasta (in fact, anything you can have with parmesan!)

      What is the most fun thing you've done?

      Playing in a 24h non-stop beachvolleyball tournament. I love leaping about in the sand. 24 hours of it: heaven!

      What did you want to be after you left school?

      I didn’t really know, so I ended up doing a degree called Human Sciences that combined lots of different things, from anthropology to genetics.

      Were you ever in trouble in at school?

      On my very first day in primary school, I got sent to stand in the corner for being disruptive. I think that marked me for life (possibly in a good way…)

      What was your favourite subject at school?

      PE (with the exception of long-distance running, which I hated)

      What's the best thing you've done as a scientist?

      Starting my own lab

      What or who inspired you to become a scientist?

      I get interested in things really quickly and then the interest often fades away. Biology is the only thing that’s kept on fascinating me so becoming a biologist seemed a logical choice.

      If you weren't a scientist, what would you be?

      I have no idea. Being a scientist becomes more of a mindset, I think. I struggle to see myself as anything else.

      If you had 3 wishes for yourself what would they be? - be honest!

      A big house with a big roof garden in the middle of London, somebody to do all my laundry for the rest of my life, and for nobody I care about to ever get a neurodegenerative disease (that would just be horrible)

      Tell us a joke.

      “Crime in multi-storey car parks. That is wrong on so many levels.” (stolen from Tim Vine)

  • Other stuff

    • Work photos:

  • My profile link:
    https://proteinsj14.imascientist.org.uk/profile/tobiaswarnecke/

    Short link: https://ias.im/u.45897

My Answered Questions

My Comments