Thomas Böttcher studied chemistry and biochemistry at the Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU), Munich, Germany, completing his Ph.D. in 2009 in the group of Prof. Dr. Stephan Sieber. After being a post-doc at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), he was a co-founder of AVIRU GmbH, a start-up focusing on development of anti-infectives.
He received a Leopoldina Research Fellowship in 2011 and moved to Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA, for postdoctoral research with Prof. Dr. Jon Clardy. In 2014, he started his independent research career at the University of Konstanz, Germany, funded by the DFG Emmy Noether program and he was a Marie Curie research fellow at the Zukunftskolleg. In 2015, he became an elected member of the Young Academy at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. Since 2020, he is full professor of Microbial Biochemistry bridging the Department of Biological Chemistry and the Department of Microbiology and Ecosystem Science at the University of Vienna, Austria.
He received various awards, including the Manfred-Fuchs-Prize 2019 and an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2020. He is member of the Collegium of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, member of the board of experts of AMICI – the Austrian Microbiome Initiative and, since 2022, elected external scientific member of the Senate Competition Committee of the Leibniz Association.
His research interests focus on the chemistry of microbial interactions, microbial secondary metabolites, customized antibiotics, as well as, chemical modulators of bacterial behavior and synthetic inhibitors of virulence.
