Franz-Ulrich Hartl (born 10 March 1957) is a German biochemist and the current Executive Director of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry.
Hartl was born in Essen, West Germany in 1957 to an electrical engineer father and a home economics teacher mother.
[1] After receiving his MD degree, one of the external examiners of Hartl's thesis, Walter Neupert, invited him to join his group at the Institute of Physiological Chemistry of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich as a postdoctoral researcher.
[4][5] In 1989, Hartl spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at William T. Wickner's group at the University of California, Los Angeles.
[6][7] During his time at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Hartl was a William E. Snee Chair and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator (1994-1997).
[17][18] Hartl is married to Manajit Hayer-Hartl, whom he met in 1986 at a molecular biology summer school on a Greek island.
Hayer-Hartl is currently a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry[19] and a close collaborator of Hartl since 1991.