Team

Oudelaar Lab

Marieke Oudelaar studied Biomedical Sciences, completing her BSc at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and her MSc at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. She then moved to the United Kingdom for her doctoral studies at the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine, University of Oxford, where she obtained her PhD in 2018. She remained in Oxford for two more years as a Junior Research Fellow.

In 2020, she moved to Germany to establish the independent research group “Genome Organization and Regulation” at the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences, with support from the Lise Meitner Excellence Program. In 2026, she was appointed Director at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg, where she now leads the Department of Genome Biology.

Her research focuses on the interplay between 3D genome organization and the regulation of gene expression. Her scientific achievements have been recognized by several honors, including the Radcliffe Department of Medicine Graduate Prize from the University of Oxford in 2018, the Bayer Early Excellence in Science Award in Biology in 2022, selection as an EMBO Young Investigator in 2023, and an ERC Starting Grant from the European Research Council in 2023.