Prof. Dr. Oliver Zerbe

Oliver Zerbe was born in 1963 and studied chemistry at the University of Hamburg, Germany, and in Southampton, UK. He received his Ph.D. in 1994 in organic chemistry from the University in Zurich under the supervision of Wolfgang von Philipsborn in the field of NMR methodology as applied to peptides. From 1994 to 1995 he we was a postdoc with Kurt Wüthrich at the Federal Technical University of Switzerland (ETH) working on the design of pulse sequences for isotopically labeled proteins. He received his habilitation in medicinal chemistry from the Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, ETH Zurich, in 2004 under the guidance of Gerd Folkers. Oliver Zerbe is presently head of the NMR facilities and lecturer of the Institute of Organic Chemistry of the University of Zurich where he became a Privatdozent in 2005 and Titularprofessor in 2008. The research interests of his group are centered on structures and folding of membrane-associated biomolecules, aspects of the recognition of hormones by their receptors, structures of G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) and the study of repeat proteins. His group also worked on carbohydrate models for recognition of cell-surface exposed membranes, and on the translocation mechanism of cell-penetrating peptides. We primarily use recombinant methods and protein expression but also solid-phase peptide synthesis to produce the peptides of interest and high-resolution NMR techniques to determine their structures.