Prof. Dr. Caroline Kisker

Portfolio: research and academic career development

As Vice-President, Caroline Kisker will be responsible for the portfolio of ‘research and academic career development’. Prof. Kisker is holding the Chair of Structural Biology at JMU.

Working as a researcher at a Centre of Excellence for the life sciences and serving as Dean of a Graduate School that has provided training to around 700 doctoral researchers in the fields of medicine, psychology and the natural sciences, Prof. Kisker has gained a wealth of experience that makes her ideally suited for her new position as Vice-President for Research and Academic Career Development. She will use that experience to help JMU secure more funding under the Excellence Initiative in the future and foster the development of early career researchers.

Curriculum vitae

Born in 1964, Prof. Kisker studied biochemistry at Freie Universität Berlin and earned her doctorate with a thesis in the fields of structural biology and biochemistry in 1994. She was a postdoc at the California Institute of Technology (USA) and later held positions as Assistant Professor and Associate Professor at the Stony Brook University (USA). In 2005, Prof. Kisker was appointed to a professorship at the Rudolf Virchow Centre - Centre for Integrative and Translational Bioimaging at the University of Würzburg. Since 2016, she has led the Centre together with Bernhard Nieswandt. Since 2009, Prof. Kisker has also served as Dean of the Graduate School of Life Sciences at the University of Würzburg, for which she helped secure funding under the Excellence Initiative.

The research interests of Prof. Kisker are in DNA repair mechanisms and structure-based drug design to identify new therapeutics against infectious diseases and tumours.