Curriculum Vitae Prof. Kai Johnsson
Kai Johnsson is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research, Department of Chemical Biology since 2017. He was appointed after being Full Professor at the Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and co-director of the NCCR Chemical Biology. His current research interests are the development and application of chemical approaches to study and manipulate protein function. His past achievements include the introduction of different approaches to specifically label proteins in living cells; among these the SNAP-tag and CLIP-tag have become popular in the biological community.
Kai Johnsson is Executive Editor of the Journal of the American Chemical Society since 2021. He is member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Science and of the Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation. He is co-founder of Covalys Biosciences which was based on protein labeling technologies developed in his laboratory; these technologies are now available through New England BioLabs. He received the Prix APLE for the invention of the year 2003 of EPFL, the Novartis Lectureship Award 2012/13, the Karl-Heinz Beckurts Prize 2016, an ERC Synergy Grant in 2025 and is elected member of EMBO.
Education |
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1992 |
PhD in Chemistry, Department of Chemistry, ETH Zürich, Switzerland |
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1988 |
Diploma in Chemistry, Department of Chemistry, ETH Zürich, Switzerland |
Positions held |
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1993 – 1996 |
Postdoctoral fellow; Department of Chemistry, UC Berkeley, USA |
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1996 – 1999 |
Independent researcher; Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany |
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1999 – 2005 |
Assistant Professor; Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering, EPFL Lausanne, Switzerland |
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2005 – 2009 |
Associate Professor; Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering, EPFL Lausanne, Switzerland |
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2009 – 17
2018 – |
Full Professor; Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering, EPFL Lausanne, Switzerland Affiliated Professor; Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering, EPFL Lausanne, Switzerland |
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2017 – |
Director; Max Planck Institute for Medical Research, Heidelberg, Germany, Head of the Department of Chemical Biology |
Commissions of Trust |
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2003 – 2010 |
Board of Directors, Covalys Biosciences , Switzerland |
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2005 – 2020 |
Associate Editor of ACS Chemical Biology |
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2006 – |
Editorial Board of Chemistry & Biology |
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2008 – |
Editorial Board of ChemBioChem |
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2010 – |
Editorial Board of Chemical Society Reviews |
| 2012 – 2020 | Editorial Advisory Board of Science |
| 2021 – | Executive Editor of the Journal of the American Chemical Society |
Memberships of Scientific Socities |
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1996 – |
Member, American Chemical Society |
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1998 – |
Member, Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker |
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2001 – |
Member, Swiss Chemical Society |
Institutional Responsibilities |
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2020 – |
Member of the International Advisory Board of the Institut Curie; Paris |
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2016 – 2021 |
Member of the EMBL Scientific Advisory Committee |
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2012 – 2017 |
Member of the school-wide tenure committee of EPFL |
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2010 – 2017 |
Co-Director of the Swiss-wide research program NCCR Chemical Biology (budget of SFR 4 million per year) |
| 2003 – 2015 | Member of the steering committee of Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering, EPFL |
Fellowships and Awards |
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| 2025 | ERC Synergy Grant |
| 2025 | Academia Sinica Chemical Biology Lecture; Taiwan |
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2022 |
XingDa Lecture; Peking University |
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2021 |
Hansen Family Award in Medical Sciences; Bayer Foundation |
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2019 |
Elected Member of the Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften |
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2016 |
Karl-Heinz-Beckurts-Preis |
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2015 |
AbbVie Lecture, UC Berkeley |
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2013 |
Elected Member of EMBO |
| 2012 | Novartis Lectureship Award |
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2012 |
Leica Scientific Forum Lectureship Japan (Osaka, Kyoto, Tokyo) |
| 2011 | Amgen Lecture, UC Berkeley |
| 2003 | Prix APLE for the invention of the year 2003 of EPFL Lausanne |
Entrepreneurship |
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2003 |
Co-founder of Covalys Biosciences; development of tools for protein labeling |
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2013 |
Co-founder of Quartet Medicine; development of new treatments for neuropathic pain |
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2014 |
Co-founder of Spirochome SA; development of new probes for fluorescence microscopy |