Matthias studied chemistry at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), the École Nationale Supérieure de Chimie de Montpellier (ENSCM) and the University of Heidelberg, where he graduated in 2008. After completing his master thesis under the supervision of Prof. Christian Klein, he joined BASF SE in Ludwigshafen for a four-month industrial internship, followed by three months of voluntary social work in Tororo, Uganda. He then moved to the University of Tübingen to work in the group of Prof. Stefan Laufer where he primarily focused on protein kinase inhibitors targeting the Janus kinase (JAK) family. In 2014, Matthias obtained his Ph. D. in pharmaceutical/medicinal chemistry with honors (summa cum laude). He joined the lab of Prof. Karl-Heinz Altmann at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zürich to pursue postdoctoral research on the total synthesis and biological characterization of complex natural products from the mycolactone family. He returned to Tübingen in 2017 as a fellow of the Recruitment of Excellent Young Researchers program and was appointed as an Assistant Professor ("W1 Juniorprofessor") at the Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences at Tübingen University in 2019. In the same year, he became Associate Investigator in the Cluster of Excellence "Image-guided and Functionally Instructed Tumor Therapies (iFIT)". Very recently, he was appointed Full Professor (W3) at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Tübingen, where he is heading the new Department of Medicinal Chemistry at the Institute for Biomedical Engineering.
Matthias' research interests include medicinal chemistry and chemical biology as well as drug targeting approaches with current key areas of research being the design of covalent protein kinase inhibitors and the development of novel electrophilic warheads for covalent targeting approaches. Special efforts are directed towards the development of highly selective chemical probes for mapping the untargeted kinome.
