Dr. Asifa Akhtar has broken ground in more than one way. For one, she became the first international woman to take the vice president role of the Biology and Medicine Section at Max Planck Society in 2020. This society is Germany’s highest performing institution in the Nature Index.
Next up: the 2021 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize. Akhtar received this honor in March 2021 for her work on epigenetic gene regulation. Alongside the recognition comes Germany’s most prestigious research funding prize. These are just the latest among the many accolades and awards Akthar has garnered for her contributions to the field.
Asifa Akhtar: a leading expert on cell biology and gene expression
Akhtar hails from a Pakistani background. But in her time in Germany, she has contributed tons of research to molecular biology. She has made and aided in many important discoveries about cell biology and epigenetics. Simply, epigenetics refers to the factors beyond DNA that condition gene expression.
Currently, Akhtar has a prominent role as a senior group leader and director at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics. There, the runs a lab on chromatin and epigenetic regulation. She focuses on how chromatin structure plays an essential role in the regulation of gene expression.
Her new role as the vice president of the Biology and Medicine Section brings Akhtar new responsibilities and missions. One of these is making sure that more diverse cohorts of young scientists lead scientific research in Europe to new territories.
“I’m aware of the responsibility on my shoulders and I take it very seriously,” says Akhtar. “I want to show that there are role models who can push things forward.”
A member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation, and recipient of the European Life Science Organization award in 2008 and the Wilhelm Feldberg Prize in 2017, Akthar stands out in the European scientific community for her accomplishments. She also hopes to inspire women and minorities in the academic world. “I’m very sympathetic to what the younger generation goes through, because I’ve just been through it myself,” she says.
Dr. Asifa Akhtar embraced the academic lifestyle
Akhtar explains that her introduction to the cosmopolitan life that sits at the core of the academic journey started as a teenager. At this time, she moved with her family from Karachi to Paris. She did not have a definitive plan on what to do with her career while finishing up her A-levels in Karachi. Nevertheless, Akhtar new she wanted to pursue higher education.
Thus, she went to London. “My original plan was to go in the area of medicine,” says Akhtar. “But what I also found very interesting were the nitty-gritty details of a cell, of really how things are working, how things are built.” So she decided to pursue biology instead. After a summer project at University College London, where she discovered her “passion for science and the joy of doing experiments,” she went on to start her PhD at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, completing it in 1997.
Next, it was time “to test myself in a different environment,” recalls Akhtar. She moved to the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, as a postdoctoral fellow in Peter Becker’s lab. There, she embarked on new experiences, heading a research group from 2001 to 2009. At that point, she moved on to her current institute at the Max Planck Society.
Akhtar remembers how she grew as a person and a scientist during her years as a group-leader and attending conferences around the world. She acknowledges how key her interactions and collaboration with her team were, since “at the time, I also had a child and was juggling running a lab and being a mum.”
Dr. Asifa Akhtar moves forward with new research endowment
Dr. Akhtar’s contributions to the understanding of X-chromosome regulation, of how genes are “turned on and off” and how this contributes to cellular and biological diversity of humans are bound to grow in the future. She says that the Leibniz price was “a wonderful piece of news to brighten a year overshadowed by the pandemic” and “a great honor and a great recognition for the work that we have done.”
Apart from the aspect of prestige, her most recent prize will also support her and her lab’s research with an endowment of 2.5 million euros. Readers, students and enthusiasts of cell biology can see a list of the research produced by the Akhtar lab in Freiburg here.
