Research Award

Lucas Jae is one of the 2025 ERC Consolidator awardees. The award comes with funding of up to two million euros for a period of five years. Through Consolidator Grants, the European Research Council (ERC) helps excellent scientists expand and consolidate their innovative research. 

Biochemist Lucas Jae is Associate Professor of Functional Genomics at LMU’s Gene Center Munich. His research investigates mitochondria, the powerhouses of the cell, looking at how they work and their role in human diseases.

The increase in human life expectancy and associated rise in late-life morbidities will be one of the main societal challenges of this century. In the cell, mitochondria play a key role in the aging process and in the development of age-related diseases. As the sole endosymbiotic organelles of the human cell, mitochondria must elaborately interface with their environment – inside the cell and beyond – for the effective detection and resolution of mitochondrial dysfunction.

Lucas Jae’s research has opened up a path for the systematic investigation of the stress response of human mitochondria. Combining genome-wide screening with methods from synthetic biology and biochemistry, he has managed to identify the key signaling pathway mediating mitochondrial perturbations. In his new ERC project mitoSCALES (Scales of Mitochondrial Stress Response), Jae will elucidate the molecular triggers of this pathway, the biochemical interplay of its components, and how this relates to their other cellular functions – an important precondition for decoding the role of these processes in human pathologies.

Specifically, Jae will investigate the functional remodeling of the cell in the wake of mitochondrial stress and how this shapes cell fate decisions. To this end, he will examine the crosstalk with a secondary mitochondrial stress response and how this can be tuned to bolster cell viability. In addition, he will create new paradigms for studying non-autonomous mitochondrial stress signaling and responses via genomics. “Our goal is to decipher mitochondrial stress responses to inspire tomorrow’s biomedical solutions for longer, healthier lives across the population,” says Jae.

For more information about Lucas Jae and his research, please visit the Jae lab website.