Curriculum Vitae

Zbigniew Pianowski was born (1982) and raised in Krakow (Cracow) on the south of Poland. In addition to his early interest in chemistry he also completed 8-years of classical piano education. In 2001, he entered Interfaculty Mathematic and Sciences Collegium (MISMaP) at the Warsaw University, Poland. His master studies combined chemistry with selected subjects of biology and computer sciences. The practical work towards the master thesis was performed in the Institute of Organic Chemistry, Polish Academy of Sciences (team of Prof. M. Makosza) on the mechanisms of radical chemistry applied in organic synthesis (under Dr. K. Stalinski). It was followed by graduation with summa cum laude at the Department of Chemistry in 2004.

The same year he joined the group of Prof. N. Winssinger in the Institut des Sciences et d’Ingenierie Supramoleculaires (ISIS) of the Universite Louis Pasteur (Strasbourg, France) for his doctoral studies on programmable supramolecular chemistry. He received his Ph.D. grade in 2008 for investigations on the use of peptidonucleic acids in biologically relevant templated reactions and encoding of combinatorial libraries of bioactive compounds.

In late 2008, he became a postdoctoral researcher in the group of Prof. D. Hilvert at the ETH Zurich, Switzerland. There, he worked on engineering of protein capsids and synthesis of chemical probes for the process of directed evolution of enzymes.

Since 2014, he became an independent research group leader at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology