Breaking new ground at IMB

IMB is a modern research centre and an exciting place to work for young, ambitious scientists. We study questions at the very forefront of biological research. Generous support by the Boehringer Ingelheim Foundation means that our researchers can embark on ground-breaking long-term projects that could not be achieved in other institutions.

As a PhD student or postdoc at IMB, you will be a key part of our research team and work on projects of fundamental biological importance or of relevance to human disease. Your research will be conducted in a vibrant and highly interdisciplinary environment with leaders in the fields of epigenetics, genome stability, developmental biology and systems biology. 

Our strong focus on interrelated research areas has brought together a critical mass of experts who work in a dynamic research environment. Scientists working at IMB include biochemists, cell and developmental biologists, geneticists, physicists and bioinformaticians. As a result you will work in a highly interdisciplinary environment and will have access to a wide range of cutting-edge techniques. At IMB you can, for example, perform genomic analyses via next-generation sequencing, look at cells in unprecedented detail with our super-resolution nanomicroscopes or model complex regulatory networks.

At IMB we make sure our scientists can work productively. A key part of the support we offer comes from our state-of-the-art Core Facilities. They provide services in bioinformatics, cytometry, histology, microscopy and sequencing, and are staffed by experts who are there to advise and assist you during each step of your experiments from the initial conception to the analysis of your data.

As part of the dynamic and collaborative spirit at IMB, all key equipment is shared between research groups and looked after by trained staff in the Core Facilities. This means you will always have access to the most up-to-date and well maintained equipment that you need to carry out your experiments.

In addition to the training available through our Core Facilities, IMB has training programmes for both specialist scientific techniques and key transferable skills. The scientific training we provide includes courses on key topics such as statistics, the analysis of large data sets (including those generated by microarrays and next generation sequencing methods) and advanced live and super-resolution microscopy. We also make sure our junior scientists learn the soft skills required for a successful career in an increasingly competitive scientific world both within and outside of academia. Courses we offer will cover topics such as presentation skills, scientific writing and project management, as well as conflict management and leadership skills.

The working language at IMB is English and our researchers and students come from all around the world. As a consequence, you’ll feel at home here no matter where you are from.

We are situated on the campus of Johannes Gutenberg University, Germany’s fifth largest University, which has a lively and diverse student population with over 4,000 international students. Our other immediate neighbours include two Max Planck Institutes and Mainz’s University of Applied Sciences. Together, this makes Mainz a young and dynamic environment to conduct research.

The city of Mainz itself is part of the vibrant Frankfurt metropolitan area, with well over 5 million inhabitants.

To become a PhD student at IMB, please look at the webpages for our International PhD Programme.

If you are interested in becoming part of the IMB team as a Postdoc, please check our IMB Postdoc Programme pages or contact the Group Leader whom you would like to join directly.