Michael Hackenberg

Michael Hackenberg is an Associate Professor at the Genetics Department of the University of Granada (Spain) where he also obtained his PhD in 2005 working on human retrotransposons under the supervision of Prof. José Oliver. For his PhD thesis, he obtained the Excellence Award from the University of Granada in 2010.  After post-doctoral stays at the Chair of Genome Oriented Bioinformatics of the Technical University of Munich (2006/2007) and at the Research Centre CIC bioGune (Derio, Spain; 2007-2009) he went back to the University of Granada in 2009 after obtaining a Juan de la Cierva Grant from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. In 2011 he was appointed an Assistant Professor position and since January 2018he is an Associate Professor.

Michael’s main research lines are about DNA methylation and small RNAs being the main focus over the last years on the data analysis and interpretation of high-throughput sequencing experiments. He contributed to this field by coediting the book “Bioinformatics for High Throughput Sequencing” which was published by Springer and by developing several, highly used tools and databases. Among those, miRanalyzer (published in 2009 and 2011 in Nucleic Acids Research) and its successor sRNAbench are of particular success with hundreds of users and over 350 citations in the Web Of Science. He filed two patent applications and in 2014, along with collaborators from the University Medical Center in Amsterdam he founded ExBiome, a company dedicated to the development of next-generation non-invasive biomarkers. Currently, he is maintaining several highly successful collaborations with research groups from Spain, The Netherlands, Czech Republic, United States, Israel and Australia covering several topics of small RNA research including the small RNA response to abiotic stress in plants or the secretion of small RNAs into (cancer) exosomes.

Michael is teaching both, genetics (classical and molecular genetics in the Biology Degree) and subjects related to bioinformatics both at degree (Biochemistry Degree) and master level (Genetics and Evolution, and Biotechnology Master Programs). Apart from one successfully defended doctorate in 2014, he is currently supervising 4 PhD students and he is a member of the ELBA Innovative Training Network financed by the European Union.