Markus Hafner, Ph.D., is a Senior Investigator in the Intramural Research Program (IRP) of the National Institute for Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS), which is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, MD. He was appointed Earl Stadtman Tenure Track Investigator in 2014 and awarded tenure in 2019. Before joining NIAMS, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Laboratory of Dr. Thomas Tuschl at Rockefeller University in New York. There he worked on mechanisms of gene silencing by small RNAs and developed methods to characterize post-transcriptional gene regulation by RNA binding proteins.

Before coming to the United State, Dr. Hafner obtained an M.Sc. in chemistry in 2002 and a Ph.D. in biochemistry in 2007 from the University of Bonn, Germany. His graduate work under Dr. Michael Famulok focused on the use of RNA aptamers to select small molecule inhibitors for cytohesins, a family of guanosine exchange factors, which revealed their role in the insulin signaling pathway.

In his RNA Molecular Biology Laboratory at NIAMS, Dr. Hafner focuses on dissecting the composition of ribonucleoproteins (RNPs) involved in cellular RNA transport and control of RNA stability. This is a prerequisite for understanding the consequences of dysregulation and/or mutation of RNA-binding proteins (RBPs), and/or their target RNA-binding sites in disease. He has coauthored more than 100 publications on various aspects of posttranscriptional gene regulation.