Alexander Meissner

Dr. Meissner is Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society and currently the Managing Director of the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin. He is heading the Department of Genome Regulation and remains a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard University. Before his move to the Max Planck Institute he was a tenured Professor at Harvard University and Senior Associate Member of the Broad Institute where he co-directed the Epigenomics Program.

Dr. Meissner obtained his undergraduate training in biotechnology from the Technical University in Berlin, Germany and completed is PhD and postdoctoral training at the Whitehead Institute (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in Cambridge, USA. He is the recipient of a Weizmann Institute of Science, Karyn Kupcinet fellowship, a Boehringer Ingelheim PhD fellowship, a Pew Biomedical Scholarship and was named a New York Stem Cell Foundation, Robertson Investigator as well as elected as a Member to the European Molecular Biology Organization.

Dr. Meissner laboratory uses genomic tools to study developmental and disease biology with a particular focus on epigenetic regulation. Dr. Meissner and his colleagues have pioneered next generation sequencing technologies to study the epigenome in mammalian development and disease.