Associate Professor Till Boecking

Till Böcking leads the Molecular Machines Group in the EMBL Australia Node for Single Molecule Science. Originally trained in biochemistry at the University of Bonn in Germany, he crossed disciplines and completed a PhD in Biophysics at UNSW with Hans Coster and Kevin Barrow in 2004. During his doctoral and subsequent postdoctoral research with Justin Gooding and Michael Gal, he developed self-assembly chemistries to assemble biomolecules on surfaces. This work lead to the development of biosensors and the discovery of fundamental principles that govern the performance of these devices. In 2006 he joined the group of Tomas Kirchhausen at Harvard Medical School to elucidate the mechanism of the chaperone-mediated disassembly of the protein coat surrounding endocytic vesicles. Till was awarded a Cross-Disciplinary Fellowship of the Human Frontier Science Program in 2007. Since returning to Australia, Till leads independent research focused on understanding biological processes at the molecular level using approaches from the physical sciences. In particular his team uses single-molecule techniques to resolve mechanistsic questions inaccessible with traditional approaches.