Anthony Hyman
Director General
Director General's Office
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A former EMBL group leader, Anthony Hyman, returned to EMBL after 13 years at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany. He was one of four founding directors of, and a group leader there. Hyman held the role of the institute’s Managing Director 2010-2013 and 2021-2023, and currently also holds a professorship of Molecular Biology at Technische Universität Dresden, Germany.
From 1993 to 1999, Hyman was a group leader and visiting senior scientist at EMBL Heidelberg. He studied Zoology at University College London before moving to the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, MRC in Cambridge, England, for his doctoral research. He obtained his PhD in 1988 (awarded by King’s College, Cambridge University), and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco, USA.
Hyman’s research focuses on unravelling the intricacies of biological condensates and phase separation in health and disease. Biomolecular condensates are a class of membraneless organelles that carry out different functions within the cell. The Hyman lab studies how phase separation impacts the formation of such membraneless compartmentalisation of macromolecules inside living cells. Understanding how and why condensates form and how they can transform into irreversible protein aggregates has important relevance for studying neurodegenerative diseases like ALS and Alzheimer’s disease.
His work has received some of the highest accolades: the EMBO Gold Medal (2003); the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize (2011) for his work on microtubules and cell division; the Körber European Science Prize (2022); and the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2023) for discovering a fundamental mechanism of cellular organisation mediated by phase separation of proteins and RNA into membraneless liquid droplets. Hyman is a Fellow of the Royal Society (2007) and is an elected member of EMBO (2000), the Academia Europaea (2014), the National Academy of Sciences (2020), the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (2021), and the Austrian Academy of Sciences (2023).