Hafen, Ernst, Prof.

Ernst Hafen obtained his PhD from the Biocenter at the University of Basel in 1983. After a position as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California in Berkeley from 1984 to 1986, he joined the Zoological Institute of the University of Zurich as an assistant professor in 1987. After promotion to associate (1994) and full professor (1997) he served as the director of the Zoological Institute from 2004 to 2005. In 2005 he accepted a professorship at the Institute of Molecular Systems Biology at the Department of Biology at ETH Zurich.

Ernst Hafen has made several contributions to the field of developmental biology and cell biology. These include the development of an in situ hybridatzion method and its application to the localization of transcripts from homeotic genes and segmentation genes, the characterization of genes and the corresponding signaling pathways involved in photoreceptor cell fate specification and in the control of cell and body size. He has received several prizes and has served on the Editorial Boards of various journals and scientific committees. He is a co-founder of the Genetics Company, a privately held biotech company in Zurich-Schlieren.

In 2008 we initiated the multidisciplinary systems biology project WingX - The Systems Biology of the Drosophila Wing. This project is funded by the Systems Biology Initiatve SystemsX.ch. Researcher from biology, physics, engineering and computer science form ETH, EPFL, and the Universities of Zürich, Basel and Lausanne collaborate towards a predictive computer model of the development of the Drosophila wing, an simple and well understood structure.

Research

The development from a single fertilized egg cell to a fully grown organism is controlled by the genome. In spite of the remarkable similarity of gene number and gene sequences between species as different as flies, mice, and humans, these species differ greatly in their body plan, shapes, and sizes. We want to understand the genetic control of development and how diversity is generated. By making use of the powerful genetic tools available in Drosophila, we have been identifying genes that control developmental processes such as the specification photoreceptor cell fate or the control of cell and body size. While genetics permits identification of key genes in a developmental process, it is more difficult to obtain all the components of an entire cellular network. At the Institute of Molecular Systems Biology we team up with experts in proteomics to complete our genetic networks and with modeling specialists to obtain a more complete understanding of development and diversity.