PD Dr. rer. nat. Anja Zeigerer

Anja studied biology in Heidelberg, Germany and in New York City, USA. Being originally trained as a cell biologist, she joined the lab of Prof. James E. Rothman at Sloan Kettering for her diploma thesis, after which she moved to Weill Cornell Medical College for her PhD, where she investigated the intersection of insulin signaling and cellular membrane trafficking in fat cells with Prof. Tim McGraw. Here, her interest in metabolism was born and continued to grow during her first postdoc with Prof. Jeff Friedman at Rockefeller University studying leptin secretion from adipocytes.

The theme of her current research, however started with her second postdoc with Prof. Marino Zerial at the Max Planck Institute for Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, where she discovered a pivotal role of the endo-lysosomal system in liver metabolism. In 2015, Anja then joined the Institute for Diabetes and Cancer at Helmholtz Munich as a junior group leader, and is now head of the research division "Endocytosis and Metabolism".

Her work has been published in Nature, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Metabolism, or Cell Reports, among others. She is a guest editor for Molecular Metabolism and serves as reviewer for journals such as Cell, Science, Nature Metabolism, etc. as well as for national and international funding agencies. Her work on understanding the connection between endosomal membrane trafficking and metabolic regulation has won several prestigious grants, most recently the H2020-MSCA-ITN 2020 Network Grant.

Anja has dedicated her career to identify novel functions of endosomal regulators in liver metabolism with impact on metabolic disease such as type-2 diabetes and fatty liver disease. On the other hand, she is interested in investigating the influence of extracellular metabolic cues on intracellular membrane transport. Anja believes that coupling basic cell biology and membrane transport with physiological approaches in mice could substantially enhance our knowledge of the function of intracellular trafficking components in metabolic control and has the potential to provide novel therapeutic targets and approaches for treatments of human metabolic diseases

Liver MetabolismIntracellular Membrane Trafficking  EndocytosisNAFLD Cell culture of primary hepatocytes  Confocal microscopy and quantitative imagingDiabetes