Benedikt Dürr

Internship student

Originally from Bavaria, Benedikt obtained his master’s degree in human biology from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München where he also completed his bachelor in biology.

In his master’s thesis in the lab of Liron Bar-Peled, MGH & Harvard Medical School, he characterised recently discovered protein interactions in the KEAP1/NRF2 pathway, which human cells use to maintain oxidative homeostasis. In previous projects Benedikt focused on mechanisms of the mammalian circadian clock (Maria Robles, LMU), recreation of cellular life (Petra Schwille, MPI Martinsried) and utilising the CRISPR effector protein Cas13a for medical diagnostics (iGEM Munich 2017).

Following this exploration of research topics and his biological background his current goal is to decipher underlying and shared principles of biological life forms as well as how they developed.

In our group, Benedikt was working on the reconstruction of projection neuron morphologies in D. sechellia and their comparison to D. melanogaster for 6 months end of 2022 and beginning of 2023. Now he is a PhD student at the Centre for Organismal Studies at Heidelberg University in the group of Gaspar Jekely.