Simone Reber is Professor of Biochemistry and a Max Planck Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin. Her research asks how cells build subcellular structures of the right size and shape, and how these structures adapt to cell size, temperature, and mechanical load. Her lab combines biochemical reconstitution, from purified proteins to Xenopus egg extracts, with quantitative imaging, advanced biophotonics, biophysical measurements, and theory. The lab’s research interests are twofold. First, it studies the cytoskeleton of parasites: how microtubules and their associated proteins determine the shape and mechanical properties of parasites such as Plasmodium, and how these properties enable functions such as host cell invasion. This line of work builds on the lab’s purification of functional Plasmodium tubulin (Hirst et al., Current Biology 2022). Second, the lab investigates the biophysical properties of subcellular structures, such as the mitotic spindle and the nucleus, and of the cytoplasm in which they assemble. A central insight is that the physical state of the cytoplasm is itself a regulator: cell-state-specific cytoplasmic density tunes spindle architecture and size during differentiation (Kletter et al., Nature Cell Biology 2025), and conserved nucleocytoplasmic density homeostasis organizes cells across eukaryotes (Biswas et al., Nature Communications 2025). Simone Reber studied molecular biology and biochemistry in Heidelberg, Seattle, and Zurich. She received her PhD from the ZMBH in Heidelberg with Oliver Gruss and was a postdoc with Anthony Hyman and Frank Jülicher at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden. She was a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and led an independent group at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin from 2015 to 2022.

Projects of Simone Reber