Anke Becker is a Full Professor of Microbiology at Philipps University of Marburg and Director of the Center for Synthetic Microbiology (SYNMIKRO), a joint initiative with the Max Planck Institute. She studied Biology and earned her PhD in microbial genetics at Bielefeld University. She has been a visiting researcher at MIT and has held academic positions at both Bielefeld and Freiburg universities.
She has received prestigious fellowships such as the Heisenberg and Lise-Meitner, as well as the FEBS National Lecturer Award (2023). She has also served on high-level scientific committees in Germany and the European Union.
Her research focuses on the organization and evolution of bacterial genomes, microbial adaptation to environmental changes, and microbe-host interactions, applying synthetic biology approaches to design novel genetic functions in bacteria.