Dr. Philipp Schiffer

I received my German Diplom degree in Biology from the University of Cologne, and then went on to obtain my PhD in Zoology (supervised by Einhard Schierenberg) with a grant I had won in a call by the Volkswagen Foundation.

Following my PhD I worked for Thomas Wiehe in the populations Genetics lab in Cologne, and at the same time as a Lecturer in Computational Biology at the Zoology department in Cologne. I then moved to Maria Leptin's group at the EMBL in Heidelberg. Subsequently, I worked three years as a senior postdoc in Max Telford's lab at UCL and then one year as a Teaching Fellow.

Throughout my career, I have worked on all kinds of different topics in evolutionary biology. Starting with goose barnacle biogeography I transitioned to work on the evolution of sex and on EvoDevo in nematodes. Next I worked on the immune system of the zebrafish, and mainly on the enigmatic Xenoturbella in London.