Maria Leptin, PhD, is the President of the European Research Council (ERC) (read  here), Europe’s major funding agency for fundamental research, as of 1 November 2021.

She is full professor at the University of Cologne, Germany, and has served as Director of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) from 2010 to 2021. The European Research Council is the first pan-European funding body for frontier research in all disciplines. Since its start in 2007, more than 12,000 projects and over 10,000 researchers have been selected for funding, 9 of which won the Nobel Prize.

Passionate about fundamental research, she enjoys taking on new challenges and embracing new ideas. She runs two research laboratories in independent fields: Developmental Biology in Heidelberg (EMBL) and Immunology in Cologne (CECAD). She is an elected member of EMBO, the Academia Europaea and the German National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina), and an Honorary Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in the UK. She is also a Foreign Member of the Royal Society since May 2022 and an International member of the US National Academy of Sciences since 2023.