Tobias J. Erb is a Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society and Director at the Max Planck Institute for terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg, Germany. His research interests are the microbial carbon cycle, in particular the biochemistry and synthetic biology of carbon dioxide conversion. Tobi Erb's studies center on the discovery, the function and the design of novel CO2 converting enzymes from bacteria, algae and plants and their use in artificial photosynthesis, as well as the bottom-up design of complex metabolic networks and artificial cells.
Tobi Erb studied Chemistry and Biology and did his PhD (2009) at the University of Freiburg, Germany and the Ohio State University, US. After a postdoctoral stint at the University of Illinois, US, he headed a junior group at ETH Zürich, Switzerland from 2011-2014. In 2014 he became a Max Planck Research Group Leader at the MPI in Marburg, and was promoted to Director in 2017.
Tobi Erb received numerous awards, among them the Encouragement Award of the Swiss Society of Microbiology (2013), the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz-Price (2016), as well as the Research Award of the German Association for General and Applied Microbiology (2017). He was named as one of 12 up- and coming scientists of 2015 by the Chemical and Engineering News of the American Chemical Society.