Christian Münch is endowed Lichtenberg-Professor of Molecular Systems Medicine. He studied Biochemistry at the University of Tübingen and the Max Planck Institutes in Martinsried and Tübingen (Germany). He obtained his PhD from the University of Cambridge (UK), working on protein aggregation and prion-like processes in neurodegenerative diseases with Anne Bertolotti at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology. For his postdoctoral work, Christian joined Wade Harper’s laboratory at Harvard Medical School to study cellular protein quality control and the mitochondrial unfolded protein response.

In 2016, Christian became independent group leader and head of the Quantitative Proteomics Unit at the Institute of Biochemistry II (Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany). His main research interests focus on cellular stress responses to mitochondrial protein misfolding, infection and disease. Besides biochemical and molecular biology methods, his laboratory applies and develops proteomics methods to measure cellular dynamics after stress on a systems biology level. One major goal is to combine molecular with global information to gain a cell-wide understanding of cellular changes upon stress. In 2023, Christian became Lichtenberg-Professor.

For his work, Christian received two ERC Grants, an Emmy Noether Grant and won a number of prizes, the British Neuroscience Association Postgraduate Award (2011), Johanna Quandt Young Academy Science Funding Award (2018), the Aventis Foundation Bridge Award (2019), the Binder Innovation Prize of the German Society for Cell Biology (DGZ, 2020), and the Otto Meyerhof Award of the German Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (GBM, 2021). Christian is an EMBO Young Investigator. He serves in the steering committees of the BMBF Cluster4Future Proxidrugs, Collaborative Research Center 1177 Selective Autophagy, Fraunhofer Leistungszentrum TheraNova and the Excellence Cluster Initiative EMTHERA, in the editorial board of the Journal of Cellular Biochemistry and the Selection Committee for Humboldt Research Fellowships.