Just concentrate on your studies! We will financially support you with a stipend during your Master’s and a working contract during the PhD phase of the graduate program.

Conduct cutting-edge research at the forefront of Matter to Life, a highly interdisciplinary and rapidly emerging field. With a student body from across the globe, our program is taught entirely in English.

During our integrated graduate program, you will be supervised by one or more of our MPS MtL Fellows and profit from the broad and excellent School’s network.

Our graduates are prepared for a broad spectrum of careers — from academia, research management and industrial R&D to consulting, data science, and many more. Whichever path you choose, we will equip you with the skills and experience to thrive.

Lecture topic: Spatiotemporal control in synthetic and living cells using light
Bottom-up synthetic biology aims to construct cell-like systems starting from molecular building blocks and give insight into principles that give rise to cell function. Many functions in cells arise directly from the spatial and temporal control of processes such as protein localization, cell migration, tissue assembly and cell-to-cell communication. In this talk, I will present strategies of how such spatiotemporal control over adhesions in synthetic cells can be achieved with visible light using photoswitchable proteins and functions that arise from these. The photoswitchable adhesions allow us to recapitulate cell migration, to self-assemble and self-sort synthetic cells into multicellular functional architectures with high precision. Moreover, the organization in these multicellular communities is of significance for their communication and the overall arising behaviors. These synthetic cell-mimetic systems, which reduce complexity and yet capture key features of natural cells, allow us to quantify and correlate cell behavior with molecular information. Further, complementary approaches pursued with synthetic minimal cells as well as bacterial and mammalian cells allow translating concepts between different systems and integration into hybrid structures.  Overall, our work on one hand provides insight into underlying design principles of life and on the other hand engineer new synthetic cell biology. 

Max Planck Institute for Medical Research, Heidelberg

DWI – Leibniz Institute for Interactive Materials, Aachen

What would you normally do on the 3^rd advent? Perhaps light a candle, have some Christmas cookies and enjoy a peaceful Sunday... OR if you are a Fellow at our school, you might have headed over to the Matter to Life Fellow Meeting

Irene completed her lab rotations with MtL Fellows Wolfram Zimmermann and David Zwicker, who collaborated to design the project she worked on.

Mussa completed his practical training on “Signalling Dynamics in Tissue Repair” with MtL Fellow Philippe (†) Bastiaens at MPI of Molecular Physiology

Andrey explored his research passions during his lab rotation in a collaborative project led by MtL Fellows Hendrik Dietz and Petra Schwille, which took him into the rapidly developing world of protein design.

This is not the beginning of a joke, but rather the beginning of every MtL Day—and the MtL Fall Day 2025 in Mainz was no exception. PhD candidates from diverse backgrounds and Fellows from various disciplines convened as knowledge was shared, exchanged, absorbed, and amplified. This year’s host: The Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz. 

In August, a group of MtL PhD candidates, Fellows and invited speakers  gathered at the Umweltforschungsstation Schneefernerhaus on the Zugspitze for four days of talks, workshops, and stargazing.
Read the recap! 

Starting in October, there will be 18 new MtL Fellows, creating 18 new opportunities for our PhD candidates to pursue exciting research projects. 

Get a glimpse into their research!