Prof. Dr. David Pla Martín
I am a Professor of Mitochondrial Biology and Metabolism at the Institute of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology I, Medical Faculty of Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf.
I grew up in Valencia and studied there, completing my PhD at the Institute of Biomedicine of Valencia (CSIC) in 2012. In 2014, I moved to Germany for my postdoctoral training at CECAD in Cologne and continued at the Institute of Physiology of the University Hospital of Cologne. I took up my current chair in late 2023.
How a cell decides what to keep and what to discard.
What has kept me in this field is a single question that keeps returning in different forms: how a cell decides what to keep and what to discard. Mitochondria make this question concrete, because they carry their own genome and must maintain it without the repair machinery the nucleus enjoys.
The part of the job I enjoy most is the moment when a molecular mechanism suddenly explains a human disease. I work in Spanish, English and German, and switch between them more often than I intend to.