The EPS Emmy Noether Distinction Summer 2019 goes to Sarah Köster
The summer 2019 EPS Emmy Noether Distinction is awarded to Sarah Köster from the Institute for X-Ray Physics, Georg-August-University Göttingen, Germany.
The jury members decided to attribute the Emmy Noether Distinction to Prof. SARAH KOESTER, for her seminal contributions to the physics of biological cells and biopolymers, in particular for the understanding of intermediate filaments, and her impressive ability in teaching and recruiting women scientists in her field of research.
Prof. Dr. Sarah Köster, born in 1979 in Reutlingen, Germany, studied physics at the University of Ulm and performed her PhD work at Ulm University and the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Göttingen, Germany, with a research visit at Boston University, USA. She received her PhD from the University of Göttingen in 2006. Her thesis was awarded the Berliner-Ungewitter-Preis of the Göttingen physics faculty as well as the Otto-Hahn-Medaille of the Max-Planck-Society. In 2008, after two years of postdoctoral work at Harvard University with David Weitz, she returned to Göttingen as an assistant professor. In 2010 she was awarded the Helene-Lange-Preis of the EWE-Foundation. In 2011 she was promoted to tenured associated professor and in 2017 to full professor in the faculty of physics of the University of Göttingen, where she is leading the research group “Cellular Biophysics” at the Institute of X-Ray Physics. In 2016 she received an ERC Consolidator grant.
Sarah Köster leads a fairly large research group in the Georg-August University of Göttingen with a high proportion of young women scientists (14 over 17 students and postdocs). Many of her students and postdocs have been awarded prizes and fellowships themselves. Her group currently works on disentangling how molecular interactions in protein filaments define their unique mechanical properties and thereby the physical properties of biological cells.
