Patrick Cramer

Patrick Cramer has been serving as President of the Max Planck Society since 2023. Cramer studied chemistry at Stuttgart, Heidelberg, Bristol and Cambridge. In 1998, he earned his PhD from the University of Heidelberg for research he conducted at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Grenoble, France. He was then a postdoctoral fellow with Roger Kornberg at Stanford University. Between 2001 and 2014, he was Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Munich (LMU) and from 2014 to 2023 he served as Director of the Department of Molecular Biology at the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences (formerly Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry) in Göttingen. For his research on gene transcription and its regulation in eukaryotic cells Cramer received numerous awards, including the Shaw Prize in 2023, the Gregori Aminoff Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy in 2022 and the Louis Jeantet Prize for Medicine in 2021. Cramer is a Member of the German National Academy Leopoldina, the American National Academy of Sciences and The Royal Society. He served the community in many ways, for example as director of the Gene Center Munich (2004-2013), as chair of EMBL Council (2016-2019) and as chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Max-Delbrück Center in Berlin (2016-2022).