Martin Kampmann

M.A., University of Cambridge
Biophysical Characterization of Structure and Dynamics of Nuclear Pore Complex Components
presented by Sanford M. Simon (on behalf of Günter Blobel)

Martin was born in Germany, received his undergraduate education at the University of Marburg, Germany, and then obtained a master’s degree from Cambridge University, United Kingdom.

Martin entered the Rockefeller graduate program in 2003 with an exceptionally wide interest in the biological sciences that had been well nurtured by a remarkably broad exposure to the practice and thinking in several fields of biology. While he was a graduate student in our laboratory, he published two single-author papers in fields that were not principal to his thesis work. Attesting to his exceptional talent for rapid acquisition of expertise in a field new for him, he managed to complete the main body of his thesis work in little more than a year! Using electron microscopical analyses and single particle image reconstruction methods, he described the three-dimensional structure of a heptameric membrane coating module that is part of the outer layer of the huge nuclear pore complex. He succeeded in fitting in structures of those members of the heptamer that had so far been determined at atomic resolutions. This work was recently published in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology.

In addition to his many laboratory projects, he founded and organized the Yeast Club at Rockefeller. This forum serves to promote scientific exchange between students, postdocs and invited speakers. Moreover, he volunteers with New York Cares and the Science Room of the Harlem Children’s Zone Literacy Workshop.  In 2006, he received the prestigious David Rockefeller Fellowship.

Martin is going to stay in the laboratory to follow some promising lines of research that he pursued here and that are relevant to his thesis work and then will move on to his postdoctoral training at the University of California, San Francisco.