Prof. Dr. Tobias J. Erb

Tobias J. Erb is a synthetic biologist and Director at the Max Planck Institute for terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg, Germany. Erb studied Chemistry and Biology and did his PhD at the University of Freiburg (D) and the Ohio State University (US). After a postdoctoral stay at the University of Illinois (US), Tobi headed a junior research group at ETH Zürich (CH), before he relocated to the Max Planck Institute in Marburg, where he was promoted to Director in 2017.

Erb received numerous awards, among them the Research Awards of the Swiss and the German Societies for Microbiology (SGM and VAAM), the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize of the DFG (2016), the Otto Bayer Award (2018) and the Prix Forcheur (2021). He was named one of 12 up- and coming scientists by American Chemical Society’s C&EN in 2015 and elected to the European Academy of Microbiology in 2019 and EMBO in 2021.

Tobias Erb is a scientific advisor to different academic institutions and biotech companies. Erb also serves as expert member on the working groups “Life Sciences” and “Artificial Photosynthesis” at the German National Academy of Sciences and chairs the perspective committee of the Biology and Medicine Section of the Max Planck Society.

The Erb lab interfaces biology and chemistry and centres on the discovery, function and engineering of novel CO2 converting enzymes and their use in engineered and artificial photosynthesis. We cross scales from the molecular mechanisms of (micro-)biological CO2 fixation to their ecological relevance, and from understanding their natural evolution to developing new-to-nature solutions, such as the bottom-up design of synthetic chloroplasts and artificial cells.