Matthias Truttmann, PhD

I received my undergraduate training in molecular biology at the Biozentrum, University of Basel, Switzerland. For my Masters training in biochemistry and biophysics, I joined a Basel-based biotech company and worked on the inhibition kinetics of TEM-type b-lactamases. I then joined the laboratory of Dr. Christoph Dehio at the Biozentrum, University of Basel, Switzerland to pursue my doctoral studies. As a graduate student in infection biology, I worked on elucidating how pathogenic bacteria hijack host cell signaling in order to enable their own internalization. Following my graduate training, I spend almost two years working as a financial consultant for a major consulting company in Switzerland before I was willing to admit that scientific research gave me the most satisfaction. I thus quit my job and joined the lab of Dr. Hidde Ploegh at Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research / MIT in Boston as a postdoctoral fellow. As a postdoc, I started to work on a novel post-translational protein modification called AMPylation. I generated nematode-based models to examine the impact of protein AMPylation on organismal physiology, co-solved the structure of a metazoan AMPylase and discovered direct links between chaperone AMPylation and protein aggregation dynamics. Since July 2018, I am a Principal Investigator and Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular and Integrative Physiology as well as a Research Assistant Professor in Gerontology at the Medical School, University of Michigan. With my laboratory, I examine how post-translational protein modifications, such as AMPylation, regulate protein aggregation in neurodegenerative diseases and aging.