Dr. Yaowen Wu received his BS in Chemistry from Sun Yat-sen University in 2001 and his MS in Organic Chemistry from Tsinghua University in 2004 in China. After graduating as Dr rer. nat. (2008) at the Technische Universität Dortmund working at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology in Dortmund and a postdoctoral study in cell biology at King’s College London, he has been leader of an Otto Hahn group at the Max Planck Institute in Dortmund since 2010. Since 2012 he has been group leader of Chemical Genomics Centre of the Max Planck Society. His research interests are in chemical biology and biochemistry of membrane trafficking. He has received awards and honors including European Research Council (ERC) grant, Behrens-Weise Award, Biomedicine Research Prize and Otto-Hahn Medal.

Our group is interested in understanding the regulation mechanism of membrane trafficking. We use a range of chemical, molecular biological, biophysical, and X-ray crystallographic techniques to elucidate specific biological questions. To address the problems, we are developing small-molecule perturbation and new chemical methods of protein modification or tagging in the context of biological systems.