Summar Iqbal Babar

She was a girl from Karachi fascinated with human body. Now A rare genetic condition carries her name. Asifa Akhtar. Born 1971. Karachi, Pakistan. Then she went to London. Then Heidelberg. Then Munich. Then Freiburg. Then she became Vice President of an institution that has produced 18 Nobel laureates. She was fascinated by how the human body works since her school days. She finished her A-Levels in Karachi and enrolled at University College London. BSc in Biology, 1993. Then a PhD in genetics at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in London. 1997. Studying transcriptional regulation in Richard Treisman's laboratory. The same institution later renamed the Francis Crick Institute. She could have stayed in the UK. She could have moved to the United States. She chose Germany. Postdoctoral fellow at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg. 1998 to 2001. Then the Adolf-Butenandt-Institute in Munich. Both among the most prestigious molecular biology research environments in the world. In 2001 she became Group Leader at EMBL Heidelberg. In 2009 she moved to the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg. In 2013 she was appointed Director and Scientific Member. Heading the Department of Chromatin Regulation. She studies epigenetics. The factors beyond DNA that control which genes are switched on and which are switched off. How the same genetic information produces a neuron and a liver cell and a skin cell. How errors in this regulation cause cancer, neurological disorders, and developmental disease. Her laboratory focuses specifically on the MOF protein complex and dosage compensation, the mechanism by which cells balance gene expression between males and females. In a busy field, a Nature Index profile said, she has a history of asking original questions. Early Career European Life Science Organisation Award. 2008. EMBO Member. 2013. Feldberg Prize. 2017. German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. 2019. Order of Merit of the State of Baden-Württemberg. 2026. In July 2020 she became the first international female Vice President of the Biology and Medicine Section of the Max Planck Society. Re-elected for a second term in 2023. The Max Planck Society has produced 18 Nobel laureates since 1948. She helps oversee it. Then in 2021 came the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize. Germany's highest scientific honour. Selected from 131 candidates. Shortlisted to 10. She won. €2.5 million in research funding to use however she chose. She said the first thing she felt was that she could now do so much more science. My heart beats for the young scientists, she says. Academic science is a beautiful example of integration because you have people from all over the world exchanging knowledge beyond boundaries, cultures or prejudice. A girl from Karachi who did her A-Levels in a city the world does not associate with Nobel Prize science is now helping oversee the institution that has produced more Nobel laureates than most countries on earth. Asifa Akhtar. Pakistan Zindabad. 🇵🇰