Gary Lewin

Professor Gary Lewin was born on the Isle of Man and was the first in his family to go to university. He has led a research group at the Max-Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) in Berlin, Germany for more than 25 years. Early in his career he discovered a critical role for nerve growth factor in the development of inflammatory pain hypersensitivity. Later he pioneered the study of the molecular basis of mammalian sensory mechanotransduction that underlies our sense of touch and pain. Both of these research avenues have led to the development of new therapies to treat sensory disorders. In the last 15 years he also introduced the naked mole-rat as an experimental model to probe the molecular basis of extreme physiology. Professor Lewin did his first degree at the University of Sheffield in Physiology and Pharmacology and his PhD at the University of London. After post-doctoral work at SUNY at Stony Brook he moved to Germany as an Alexander von Humboldt fellow to work at the Max-Planck Institute in Munich. In 1996 he started his own group in Berlin and became a tenured Professor with a joint appointment at the Charité Medical University in 2003. Professor Lewin has received two senior ERC research grants in succession. He has fulfilled numerous leadership roles at the MDC and now responsible for one of three main research areas within the institute. He has served on many grant bodies notably as an ERC panel member for 10 years. He was elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in 2008. In 2019 he was honored with Ernst Jung Prize for Medicine a prestigious research prize in Germany.