Prof. Dr. Ulrike Kutay

Ulrike Kutay has been appointed as Assistant Professor at ETH Zurich in 1999, elected as Associate Professor in 2006, and has been a Full Professor at the Institute of Biochemistry of ETH since 2011.

Ulrike Kutay was born in Potsdam (GDR) in 1966. She studied biochemistry at the Humboldt University and the Free University in Berlin (Germany). After her diploma thesis at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin, she did her PhD studies with Prof. T. A. Rapoport (at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin-Buch and at the Harvard Medical School in Boston, USA) on the integration of proteins into cellular membranes. In 1996, she graduated ‘with the highest distinction’ from Humboldt University. As a postdoc in the group of Dr. D. Görlich at the Center for Molecular Biology at the University of Heidelberg (Germany), she turned to the investigation of transport processes between the nucleus and cytoplasm of animal cells, contributing to the discovery and mechanistic understanding of major nuclear export pathways.

With her research group at ETH Zurich, she investigates the organization, function and dynamics of the human cell nucleus, in particular its restructuring for cell division, the function of the nuclear envelope in genome organization and intracellular communication, as well as the complex pathway of ribosome synthesis. Ulrike Kutay has been an EMBO member since 2010, a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina since 2012 and of the Academy of Europe since 2014.