Tony Hyman appointed director general of European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL)

Tony Hyman took up office as director general of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) on 31/03/2026, the laboratory has announced.

Hyman is a distinguished molecular biologist and former EMBL group leader. He is also a founding director of the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany, where he stayed for 13 years.

Hyman currently holds a professorship in molecular biology at Technische Universität Dresden.

He has a well-established relationship with EMBL, having served as a group leader and visiting senior scientist at EMBL Heidelberg from 1993 to 1999. He received a Bachelor of Science from University College London and a PhD from the University of Cambridge, where he undertook doctoral research at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. He completed his postdoctoral research at the University of California, San Francisco.

Hyman has received numerous prestigious awards recognising his scientific achievements: the EMBO Gold Medal (2003), the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize (2011), the Körber European Science Prize (2022), and the…