Dr. Florent Waltz completed his Ph.D. in plant molecular biology in 2018 at the University of Strasbourg, supported by a national doctoral fellowship, where his work on mitochondrial translation sparked his love for mitochondria biology.

He then moved to Bordeaux to train in single-particle cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM). For his second postdoctoral stay, he joined the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Munich, where he specialized in cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET), supported by a two-year Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship. He subsequently moved to the Biozentrum at the University of Basel, supported by a Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship. In 2023, Dr. Waltz was awarded an SNSF Ambizione grant and established his independent research group at the Biozentrum, hosted in Prof. Benjamin Engel’s Cell Architecture Lab. His research consistently centers on mitochondria, using cryo-ET and complementary approaches to investigate the structural and functional diversity of mitochondrial molecular complexes.
He uses a variety of methods in his work, ranging from genetics to structural biology, with a focus on cryo-electron tomography, which he applies to explore the molecular landscapes of mitochondria throughout evolution.