Florian Hollfelder, Ph.D.

Florian Hollfelder was educated at the Technical University of Berlin (Diplom-Chemiker) and Cambridge University (MPhil). After a formative stay at Stanford (with Dan Herschlag) on free-energy relationships in enzymes) he joined Tony Kirby’s group at the Chemistry Department of Cambridge University working on enzyme models and physical-organic chemistry. During his PhD he also collaborated with Dan Tawfik (on the mechanism and evaluation of model enzymes such as catalytic antibodies). His postdoctoral work at Harvard Medical School (with Chris T. Walsh) was concerned with the biosynthesis and action of the natural antibiotic microcin B17.

In 2001 he returned to Cambridge to start his own research group in the Biochemistry Department, where he is Professor in Chemical and Synthetic Biology. The group’s research centres around quantitative and mechanistic questions at the chemistry/biology interface, involving low- and high-throughput approaches. Mechanistic work focuses on enzymatic bioreactions and their organic chemical counterparts, on strategies for finding and creating enzymes with novel reactions and on the pathways by which these can be enhanced by directed evolution. Most recently this approach has been extended to mechanisms of cellular development and embryology. A key technology under development in the group are ultrahigh throughput approaches for directed evolution, cell development in 3D and single cell transcriptomics.

Florian has held ERC Advanced and Starting Grants and coordinated several EU-funded trans-national collaborative initiatives, e.g. the H2020 research training networks MMBio (‘Molecular Tools for Nucleic Acid Manipulation for Biological Intervention‘) and ES-Cat (‘Directed Protein Evolution for Synthetic Biology and Biocatalysis’), ENDIRPRO & ENEFP on directed evolution of functional proteins, ProSA on protein-protein interactions and PhosChemRec on the chemical biology of phosphates. He is coordinator of the BBSRC sLOLA grant “Novel Plastizymes”, member of the EU Horizon Europe projects “BlueTools “and “BlueRemediomics” (on metagenomic exploration of marine biospheres) and co-founder of the companies DropTech and Evoralis. Florian is a Staff Fellow at Trinity Hall, where he acted as Tutor, Director of Studies and Graduate Mentor.