24 March 2025 – Sebastian Glatt completed his Master’s degree and PhD with a pharmaceutical company in Vienna before moving into academic research with a postdoctoral position at EMBL. It is a career path he says is seen as highly unusual.
“I get a lot of interest from students and associations,” he says. “I’ve seen the good and the bad on both sides of industry and academia.”
Leaving industry allowed Glatt to “switch gears” from molecular oncology to structural biology and his current expertise in tRNA modifications.
“In industry, you don’t have long-term projects. You probably have the same success, hopefully the same salary, the same topics as in academia. But what you don’t have is the continuity of working on some big question,” he says.
After eight years at EMBL, an EMBO Installation Grant enabled Glatt to start his own lab at the Malopolska Centre of Biotechnology in Krakow, Poland, in 2015. In late 2024, he returned to his hometown of Vienna as a professor at the University of Veterinary Medicine.
Glatt says his research seeks to understand how the right protein is made at the right speed in the right context, and how genetic information is translated from mRNA into a protein.
“This single bond on the tRNA basically links the RNA world with the protein world, and you have our whole life evolution in one place,” he says, adding that his research has potential human health impacts.
“Most of the processes of tRNA modifications are related to genetic diseases and cancer, and every time we publish a paper about one of these pathways my email inbox is full of questions from clinicians asking about the effect of these tRNA modifications,” he says. “This is the sweet spot between the clinical side and the basic research.”
Glatt says working in industry taught him efficiency and project management, which he built on with the EMBO Laboratory Leadership for Group Leaders course as part of his EMBO Installation Grant.
“The course itself is great, and it also puts you together with 20 other young group leaders that are exactly in the same situation,” he says. “You get a lot of tips and tricks, and in the worst case you get the feeling that others have the same problem and that really helps you. Shared problems are smaller problems.”
Glatt says being part of the EMBO Young Investigator Network provides access to excellent and highly motivated researchers who know how to move science forward.
“EMBO is really a super-active community,” he says. Glatt says it is a fantastic time to be back in Vienna which has built a network of world class research institutes, universities and biotech industry. His advice to young Austrian researchers is to get as many different experiences as possible.
“Work in labs abroad, work in labs at home, work with young PIs, work with experienced PIs because you will need all of these experiences for your own career,” he says.
