Prof. Dr. Claudia Höbartner

Claudia Höbartner studied chemistry in Vienna and Zürich, and earned a PhD degree from the Leopold Franzens University Innsbruck (Austria) in 2004. After postdoctoral research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), supported by an Erwin Schrödinger fellowship from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), she was funded by the Hertha Firnberg career development program of the FWF.

In 2008 she joined the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen as a Max Planck research group leader. In 2014 she was appointed professor at the Faculty of Chemistry at Georg August University Göttingen.

Since July 2017, she is professor of Organic Chemistry at the Institute of Organic Chemistry at the University of Würzburg. Her major research interests include the (bio)molecular chemistry of natural and synthetic nucleic acid modifications, and the in vitro selection, structural and mechanistic characterization and appliation of functional nucleic acids, with a particular focus on catalytic RNA (ribozymes) and DNA (deoxyribozymes). Her research is funded by the DFG and by an ERC consolidator grant. She was elected to the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in 2022 and received the Gottfried Wilhem Leibniz Prize in 2023.