Elena Conti is director of the Department for Structural Cell Biology at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Germany. Professor Conti is an elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organization and of the German Academy of Sciences. In 2008, Conti was awarded the Leibniz Prize, the most prestigious prize awarded to researchers in Germany.
Elena Conti stands out as one of the best structural biologists of her generation. Her research focuses on the regulation of gene expression in eukaryotic cells and aims to discover the mechanism behind RNA recognition, metabolism and degradation, which is coupled to the translation machinery. She has authored several influential scientific papers, many of which have been published in Cell or Nature.