Hartmut Luecke

Full Professor & CryoEM@NOVA Scientific Coordinator

Prof. Luecke (born in Göttingen, Germany) is a structural biologist with an emphasis on membrane protein structure-function studies and structure-based drug discovery. He began his independent career at the Stanford Synchrotron as a Structural Biologist before joining the faculty at the University of California, Irvine (UC Irvine) in 1996, where he was Professor of Biochemistry, Biophysics and Computer Science for over 20 years. He is also the founding director of the UC Irvine Center for Biomembrane Systems. In 2017, he was appointed as Professor and Assistant Director at the Norwegian Center for Molecular Medicine / University of Oslo (NCMM/UiO) leading the group on Structural Biology and Drug Discovery. At the same time, he invested in setting up cryo-EM facilities at UiO, the first such infrastructure in Norway.

His work has been published in journals such as Nature (4), Science (4), and Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA (4) with an average number of 137 citations per publication (Google Scholar h-index: 43; total citations: 11,107). During his tenure at UC Irvine, Prof. Luecke secured continuous US NIH R01 funding as a PI (between one and three simultaneous R01 grants providing between $400,000 and $1,000,000 per annum). In addition, he secured various funds from both academia and industry. After his move to Oslo, in addition to NCMM core funding, Prof. Luecke secured outside funding from Worldwide Cancer Research, the Research Council of Norway as well as five positions funded by various Horizon 2020 Marie Curie MSCA programs (Individual Fellowship, Innovative Training Network and COFUND). The total amount of funding during this 5-year period amounts to about €5M. His research is highly collaborative as is evident from ten international collaborations (nine with academia and one with industry).

He is co-inventor on patents and similar IP disclosures (T. foetus inosine monophosphate dehydrogenase; H. pylori urease structure & inhibitors; a light-activated transcription factor; small-molecule reactivation of p53 cancer mutants). Prof. Luecke is a regular reviewer for numerous grant agencies and scientific journals, and in the past ten years he was a speaker or chair at over 100 international meetings and research institutions.

https://scholar.google.de/citations?user=9JmZ6z4AAAAJ&hl=en