Academic Director

Professor Dr. rer. nat. Bärbel Friedrich
 
Professor Dr. Bärbel Friedrich, born in 1945, studied biology at the University of Göttingen from 1965 to 1970.  After receiving her PhD in microbiology from Göttingen in 1973, she worked as a post doctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1975 to 1976. From 1976 until 1984 she was Research Associate at the University of Göttingen’s Institute of Microbiology. In 1985 Professor Friedrich was appointed Full Professor of Microbiology at the Free University of Berlin. Since 1994 she has been Full Professor at Humboldt University in Berlin.
 
Her research areas include: the function and biosynthesis of metalloproteins, catalysis and biotechnological applications of oxygen-tolerant hydrogenases, and  functional bacterial genomics. She has published more than 170 papers. In addition, Professor Friedrich is group leader for the excellence cluster “Unifying Concepts in Catalysis” (UniCat). She was also a member of the German Research Council, the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (for which she has served as vice president since 2005), the German Science Foundation (DFG, for which she was vice president from 1997 to 2003), and the Federal Parliament Committee on Legal and Ethical Aspects of Modern Medicine (2003–2005).
 
Since 2008 Professor Friedrich has served as the Academic Director of the Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg Greifswald.