41èmes JFSM 2025 Portraits Dr Charlotte Uetrecht

Dr Charlotte Uetrecht

Université Siegen

Group Website

Full (W3) Professor for Chemistry
Dynamics of viral Structures
CSSB Centre for Structural Systems Biology / Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron – DESY / Institute of Chemistry and Metabolomics (ICM), University of Lübeck (UzL)
Notkestrasse 85, 22607 Hamburg and Ratzeburger Allee 160, 23562 Lübeck, Germany
Email: charlotte.uetrecht@cssb-hamburg.de

Since 2024, Dr. Charlotte Uetrecht is Full Professor for Chemistry at the University of Lübeck, co-director of the ICM and deputy director of CSSB. The main lab is located at CSSB and co-financed by DESY. Furthermore, the group is associated to the Leibniz Institute of Virology (LIV). She is specialized in studying large protein complexes, mostly of viral origin, with structural, especially native, mass spectrometry (MS) and free-electron lasers (FEL). For her MS-related developments, she received the Mattauch-Herzog Price of the German Mass Spec Society (DGMS) in 2022. She has (co‑) authored more than 70 peer-reviewed publications and an h-index of 29. She pioneered high resolution native MS analysis of intact viral capsids including their structural characterization with ion mobility cumulating in a model for the capsid assembly pathway.

From 2021-2024, she was appointed Associate (W2) Professor for Biochemistry at the University of Siegen / LIV / DESY and CSSB. In 2014, she received a junior group leader position at LIV funded by an SAW grant from the Leibniz Association. From 2011-2014, she was postdoc at European XFEL and later on guest scientist developing new sample delivery techniques based on MS. She first started on X-ray lightsource related work in Janos Hajdu’s lab in Uppsala, Sweden, as a postdoc on an EMBO longterm fellowship. For her doctoral work on native MS to analyze virus structure in the lab of Albert JR Heck in Utrecht, she was awarded the HGK Westenbrink Prize in 2011. She is jury member for the Wolfgang-Paul-Study-Price of the German Mass Spec Society (DGMS). She also coordinates the SPIDoc’s project and received an ERC Starting Grant in 2017 and the EIC Pathfinder Open MS SPIDOC in 2018, all funded by the EU.