Prof. Dr. Dario Leister
Since 2005 Dario Leister holds the position of Professor (Chair) of Plant Molecular Biology/Botany at LMU Munich. He undertook his PhD (Dr. rer. nat.) in Genetics at the Max-Planck-Institute for Plant Breeding Research in 1995. This was followed by a Habilitation in Genetics at the University of Tübingen in 2001. He has received numerous prizes and awards, including the 2003 Karl-Lohmann-Prize of the German Society for Biological Chemistry, a Top Author Award from the American Society of Plant Biologists in 2015, and election as member of the Leopoldina - Nationale Akademie der Wissenschaften in 2017. He was founding director of the Copenhagen Plant Science Centre from 2013 to 2016 and serves as a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Viikki Plant Science Center, Helsinki, Finland since 2015. He is acting as spokesperson of the Transregio-SFB 175 (The Green Hub - Central Coordinator of Acclimation in Plants) since 2016 and as coordinating PI of the ERC Synergy Cluster “PhotoRedesign” since 2020. He serves as Dean of the Faculty of Biology since 2017. Currently, his main research focus lies on the regulation and enhancement of the light reactions of photosynthesis, employing a suite of approaches (including synthetic biology and laboratory evolution) and organisms (from cyanobacteria to flowering plants).