Christian Ottmann

"As a scientist I feel that I have to give something back to society. I am doing that by helping to solve hard-to-crack biomedical problems such as drugging protein-protein interactions."

Christian Ottmann is Associate Professor of Molecular Cell and Structural Biology at the department of Biomedical Engineering (research group Chemical Biology). He works on small-molecule modulation of Protein-Protein Interactions (PPIs) with a special focus on stabilization of 14-3-3 adapter protein PPIs. He is involved in several early drug discovery projects with the pharmaceutical industry, targeting disease as diverse as cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, inflammation and cystic fibrosis. In this context he also is coordinator of the FP7 Industry-Academia Partnership and Pathways (IAPP) 14-3-3STABS and the Horizon2020 European Training Network (ETN) TASPPI. 

Christian Ottmann studied Biology (Dipl.) at the Ruhr-University in Bochum (Germany). From 1999-2003, he did his PhD research at the Eberhard-Karls-University of Tübingen under supervision of Prof. Claudia Oecking and graduated summa cum laude. From 2003-2004, he was a Postdoctoral Research Assistant with Prof. Oecking. Beginning of 2005, he founded the biotech company AmbAgon Technology in Dortmund, Germany. In 2006, he became a group leader at the Chemical Genomics Centre (CGC) of the Max Planck Society (Dortmund, Germany). In 2012, Christian Ottmann was appointed Associate Professor of Molecular and Structural Cell Biology at the department of Biomedical Engineering of Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). In that same year he was recipient of the Innovation Award in Medicinal/Pharmaceutical Chemistry of the Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker and the Deutsche Pharmazeutische Gesellschaft. In 2013, Christian Ottmann received the Young Chemical Biologist Award of the International Chemical Biology Society (ICBS). In 2014 he was appointed professor at the Institute for Organic Chemistry of the University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany).