Curriculum Vitae
Born 1979 in Emmendingen, studied Chemistry and Biology at the University of Freiburg, Germany. From 2005 to 2009, Tobias Erb did his PhD in the laboratories of Prof. Georg Fuchs at the University of Freiburg, Germany and Prof. Birgit Alber at the Ohio State University, USA. Then he was postdoc at the University of Illinois, USA. From 2011 to 2014 he headed a junior group at the ETH Zürich, Switzerland. 2014 he became an independent Max Planck Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg. Since June 2017 he is scientific member and director at the MPI in Marburg.
Research Interests
Research interests are the microbial carbon cycle, in particular the biochemistry and synthetic biology of carbon dioxide conversion. His studies center on the discovery, the function and the design of novel CO2 converting biocatalysts from bacteria, algae and plants and their use in artificial photosynthesis.
Selected Awards
He has received numerous awards, among them the Encouragement Award of the Swiss Society of Microbiology (2013), the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz-Price (2016), as well as the Resaerch Award of the German Association for General and Applied Microbiology (2017). He was named as one of 12 up- and coming scientists of 2015 by the Chemical and Engineering News of the American Chemical Society.