Ashwin Chari

Ashwin Chari completed his undergraduate degree at the ETH Zurich in biochemistry and molecular biology in 2004. He received his PhD, summa cum laude, from the Institute of Biochemistry, University of Würzburg, Germany in 2009. His PhD supervisor was Prof. Utz Fischer, the title of his PhD thesis “The Reaction Mechanism of Cellular U snRNP Assembly”.

After a short postdoctoral stay at the University of Würzburg, he moved to the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen, Germany in 2011 as DFG-funded Independent Project Leader in the Research Group for 3D Cryo-electron microscopy. He was promoted to Project Leader in the Department of Structural Dynamics in 2016. He is currently a tenured Research Group Leader for Structural Biochemistry and Mechanisms at the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences, Göttingen, Germany.

Chari is an author of more 44 research contributions, with > 5000 citations, and an H-index of 34. Chari´s research and scientific area of expertise lies in the mechanistic biochemistry of large macromolecular complexes involved in cellular RNA metabolism, proteostasis and fatty acid synthesis. For this, he and his research group determine high-resolution structures determination of large macromolecular assemblies by X-ray crystallography and cryo-EM, elucidate the inhibition mechanisms of large macromolecular assemblies to aid in drug discovery efforts, and both develop and apply methods for ultra-high resolution Structural Enzymology to decipher reaction mechanisms directly by X-ray crystallographic structures. This most recently is extended towards the application of quantum crystallographicmethods to ultra-high resolution structures of enzymes in various reaction states determined by his group.