Martin Hegner

Biography

Prof. Hegner studied Life Sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich in 1984 (CH). He received his Diplom ("master of science") degree in Cellular Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, Immunology and Toxicology in 1989 and he completed his PhD thesis in 1994 with work in the field of 'Protein Translocation across Membranes' and 'Biological Scanning Probe Microscopy' at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Institute for Biochemistry in Zurich. In 1994-96 he had a post-doctoral position at the Institute of Physics in Basel in the laboratory of Prof. H.-J. Güntherodt, a pioneer in the field of scanning probe microscopy. Thereafter ('96-'99) he joined the world leading group of C. Bustamante at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Eugene, OR and then at University of California at Berkeley, CA as a research associate to acquire know-ho in the field of single molecule manipulation with optical tweezers. In 1999 he joined the Institute of Physics at University of Basel (Switzerland) as group and project leader for biological nanoscale science within the newly founded Swiss National Centre of Competence 'Nanoscale Science'. Until today he introduced several novel approaches to investigate molecular interactions with nanomechanical tools. In 2001 he received his 'venia docendi' in Experimental Physics at the University of Basel, Switzerland and in 2007 he joined the Physics faculty of the University of Dublin, Trinity College Dublin Ireland. He was appointed as Professor and pursues his interdisciplinary research in the Centre of Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices (CRANN) in the field of Nanobiotechnology.

Research Interest

Applied physics; Biochemistry; Bioengineering; Biomarker; BIOMOLECULES; Biophysics; BIOSENSOR; Biosensors; Diagnostics; Imaging, image processing; Molecular Biology; Molecular Biophysics; Molecular markers and recognition; Multisensory technology, multi sensing; Nano Biotechnology; NANOBIOTECHNOLOGY; Nanomedicine; Nanotechnology; Nuclei acids, polynucleotides, protein synthesis; Optical Tweezers; Optics; Physics; Positioning and guidance systems; Quality, quality control, traceability; Scanning Probe Microscopy; Sensory science, sensors and instrumentation; Surface and interface physics; Surface chemistry; Surface Funtionalisation