Dr. Katja Nowick

Biography

Katja Nowick is a professor of Human Biology at Freie Universität Berlin. She performed her doctoral work at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Her research focuses on the evolution of gene regulatory networks, transcription factors, and non-coding RNAs, especially in the context of primate brain evolution. She relocated her research lab to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2008 before returning to Germany in 2010 to join the Max-Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin. In 2011, she received the Advanced Postdoc award from the Volkswagen Foundation to establish her independent research group at the University of Leipzig. Nowick's group employs various biotechnological methods, including wet-lab experiments and computational analysis, to investigate the molecular basis of species evolution. She is a founder of the 'Programming Evolutionary Biology' school and serves as an editor for the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution. Her publications include significant contributions to understanding gene regulatory factors and their adaptive roles in human evolution, with several papers published in high-impact journals such as Frontiers in Genetics and Genome Biology and Evolution.

Research Interests