Dieter Braun

Dieter’s PhD adviser told him to avoid interdisciplinary research. “You will be caught between two stools and have a hard time to get funding and citations,” were his warning words. But there was no way he could avoid it. “I’m enjoying being right between the disciplines; the work is much harder, but so much more fun,” says Dieter, now Biophysics Professor at the LMU Munich. He performs origins-of-life research from a non-equilibrium perspective, a topic his PhD adviser was very interested in, but never dared to do. While funding is indeed difficult, the approach has paid off for two of his PhD students: Philipp Baaske and Stefan Duhr who own the protein quantification startup, Nanotemper, which has more than 70 employees.