Dr. Bernd Schierwater is a Director ITZ and Professor of Zoology, TiHo University Hannover, Germany. He received his Ph.D. (special honors degree’summa cum laude’) from Technical University Braunschweig (TUB), Germany in 1989. He was a Distinguished Sabbatical Scholar at NESCent, Duke University. He was awarded with Senior Ecologist of the Ecological Society of America (2009). His training in evolutionary and ecological genetics has arisen from running laboratories at Frankfurt University (Assistant Professor), Freiberg University (Associate Professor) and Hannover TiHo University (Full Professor) and from working as a Research Associate in different departments at Yale University and also at the AMNH New York (Rob DeSalle lab). He has developed the most primitive metazoan animals, the placozoans, into an emerging model system for next generation biodiversity and cancer research.

Dr. Bernd Schierwater is interested in Trichoplax adhaerens genetic components for a systems-level understanding of regulatory pathways related to pre-programmed cell death (“apoptosis”) and cancer research. Studying the genetics of cancer in Trichoplax is an entirely novel angle towards unraveling the basic components of medically important processes in human tissues.