Rate My Professor Florian Hollfelder

Professor Florian Hollfelder holds the position of Professor of Chemical and Synthetic Biology in the Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge, and is affiliated with the School of the Biological Sciences. His academic journey began with a Diplom-Chemiker from the Technical University of Berlin and an MPhil from the University of Cambridge. He conducted research at Stanford University under Dan Herschlag, exploring free-energy relationships in enzymes. Subsequently, he worked in Tony Kirby’s laboratory in the Department of Chemistry at Cambridge, investigating enzyme models and physical-organic chemistry. During his PhD, he collaborated with Dan Tawfik on the mechanism and evaluation of model enzymes such as catalytic antibodies. Hollfelder completed his postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School with Chris T. Walsh, focusing on the biosynthesis and action of the natural antibiotic microcin B17. In 2001, he returned to Cambridge to establish his independent research group in the Department of Biochemistry.

The research in the Hollfelder group addresses fundamental questions at the interface of chemistry and biology through both low- and high-throughput methodologies. Central to their work is understanding the principles governing molecular recognition processes, which facilitates the description, manipulation, and engineering of functional molecules. Key areas include the origins of functional proteins through protein evolution, explanations of biological catalysis and molecular recognition in chemical and biophysical terms, development of biocatalysts for green industrial transformations, and leveraging droplet-based technologies to study cell development. They pioneered extreme miniaturization using picoliter droplets in microfluidic devices to tackle chemical and biological challenges, with applications in biotechnology, synthetic chemistry, and medicine. Representative publications encompass "Balancing specificity and promiscuity in enzyme evolution: Multidimensional activity transitions in the alkaline phosphatase superfamily" (2019), "Evolutionary repurposing of a sulfatase: A new Michaelis complex leads to efficient transition state charge offset" (2018), "Ultrahigh-throughput-directed enzyme evolution by absorbance-activated droplet sorting (AADS)" (2016), and "Ultrahigh-throughput discovery of promiscuous enzymes by picodroplet functional metagenomics" (2015). Additionally, Hollfelder serves as Staff Fellow and Director of Studies in Natural Sciences (Biological) at Trinity Hall.