Karin Moelling on Teaching and Mentoring
  Karin Moelling     Biography    
Recorded: 06 Jun 2006

I like to teach. So the students, I like to make complicated stories simple, so I teach a lot, yes. Well, I think it is your own enthusiasm, which has to get across, and if you look around here those people who are really excited about their own work and what they are doing, then you can get excitement also to the younger generation. And the main thing you have to give is, give them the feeling that this is exciting what’s going on here. So, the enthusiasm about what I am doing, I think that’s the basis for making it interesting. I may speak too fast; I may be demanding a little too much from medical students; but I tell them I am not going to test them on this difficult molecular biology. But, they should have heard it once in life. So that’s what I’m doing.

Karin Moelling currently retired professor, still affiliated with the University of Zurich and the Max-Planck-Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin. She studied molecular biology at the University of Berkely, Califonia. She received her PhD at the Max-Planck-Institute for Virology at Tübingen in Germany. She did two post-doctoral research at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin (1973-1975), and at the Institute of Virology, University Giessen. In 1977 she received her Habilitation at the University of Giessen in Biophysics on "Replication of retroviruses".

From 1976 till 1981 she was the Head of Independent Research Group at Max-Planck-Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin, Germany, on oncogenes, proto-oncogenes, cancer and HIV. In 1993 she became the Director of Institute of Medical Virology (IMV) and Full Professor at University of Zurich in Switzerland, she held this position till 2008. Between 2008-2009 she was Fellow of Institute of Advanced Study in Berlin and between 2008-2011 she became a Group Leader, Viruses and Cancer at University of Zurich.

Her research focus on retroviruses and cancer from molecular mechanisms to drug design. She is a Member of the European Molecular Biology Organization. She received several awards e.g. SwissAward in 2007, 4 prices: Czerny Price, Richtzenhain Price, Meyenburg Price and Ansman Price. She was Selected as Heisenberg Fellow in German Science Foundation.