Julia Mahamid elected member of German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina
The EMBL scientist has been elected to Leopoldina, the German National Academy of Sciences, in recognition of her outstanding contributions to the field of structural cell biology.
Julia Mahamid. Credit: EMBL
Julia Mahamid, Head of the Molecular Systems Biology Unit at EMBL, has been elected to Leopoldina, the German National Academy of Sciences.
Mahamid’s research focuses on studying the inner workings of cells using cryo-electron tomography, a technique that allows scientists to view macromolecular complexes in three dimensions and in their cellular or multicellular context. Her team works on integrating such high-resolution structural discoveries with cell biology, multi-omics and systems biology approaches to gain a deeper functional understanding of cells. The work spans a range of biological systems, from tiny bacteria to 3D human organoids, and addresses diverse biological questions, such as antibiotics’ mode of action, structural coordination of gene expression machineries, and cellular compartmentalisation via phase separation.
Following a PhD at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Mahamid worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry. She joined EMBL as Group Leader in 2017 and became a senior scientist in 2021. Since 2024, she heads the Molecular Systems Biology Unit together with Nassos Typas.
Over the course of her career, Mahamid has received numerous awards, including the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize (2026), the Carl Zeiss Lecture Award (2025), EMBO Gold Medal (2023), the Frankfurt Biophysics Prize (2022), and the Ernst Ruska Prize (2021). Her research has been supported by grants from the ERC (2018, 2024), Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (2022, 2024), and DFG, among others.
The German Academy of Natural Sciences Leopoldina has been the German National Academy of Sciences since 2008. Mahamid joins many illustrious EMBL researchers and alumni as a member of Leopoldina, including Eileen Furlong, Edith Heard, Tony Hyman, and Anne Ephrussi.
