Curriculum Vitae Meier-Menches

Samuel M. Meier-Menches was born in Lachen, Switzerland, in 1984. He completed his bachelor’s degree in chemistry at EPF Lausanne in 2007 and earned his master’s degree in the same field at ETH Zurich in 2009.

Fascinated by inorganic medicinal chemistry, he worked on undergraduate research projects at the University of Edinburgh in the group of Prof. P.J. Sadler (2007) as an ERASMUS student and at the University of Zurich in the group of Prof. R. Alberto (2009). He then joined Prof. B.K. Keppler’s group at the University of Vienna as a doctoral student from 2009 to 2013, where he focused on the synthesis of organometallic ruthenium(II) and osmium(II) complexes as potential anticancer agents. In 2011, he completed a research stay at the Ruhr University Bochum in the group of Prof. N. Metzler-Nolte, to gain experience in the synthesis of metal-peptide conjugates.

His growing interest in drug discovery made him aware of the necessity of analytical tools and systems concepts required to investigate drug candidates in a mechanism-based manner. He therefore joined the Bioanalysis group of Prof. C. Gerner at the University of Vienna, as a postdoc, where he acquired in-depth knowledge of mass spectrometric and analytical methods, especially proteomic techniques (2013–2016). He then joined the group of Prof. A. Casini at Cardiff University as a postdoctoral fellow, funded by the Life Science Research Network Wales, to conduct research on organometallic gold(I) complexes (2016–2017), and spent a year at the Institute of Cancer Research (Medical University of Vienna) working with Prof. W. Berger.

He thus successfully bridged the gap between different disciplines. This enabled him to integrate synthetic chemistry, analytical chemistry, molecular biology and cancer research into inorganic drug discovery research, which formed the basis of his habilitation at the University of Vienna (2020).

With this interdisciplinary background, he started his independent career in 2021 as a tenure-track assistant professor on Drug Modes of Action at the Faculty of Chemistry, University of Vienna, and partially funded by the Medical University of Vienna. In 2025, he was granted tenure and was promoted to Associate Professor. His group focusses on mode of action discovery and develops analytical tools based on mass spectrometry to comprehensively investigate candidate drugs, especially reactive inorganic candidate drugs. Together with Prof. C. Gerner, he is developing finger-sweat metabolomics as a non-invasive method for human biomonitoring and recently co-founded the spin-off company Metabognostics.

He is happily married and has two wonderful children (born in 2012 and 2014).

Samuel was recognized as an emerging scientist in Metallomics (2019) and as a ChemBio Talent (2022). In 2022, he received the Promotion Award of the City of Vienna in the category of natural science and technology. In 2024, he was selected by the students for the Faculty of Chemistry's Teaching Award (Master's program). His research has been supported with grants from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), the Hochschuljubiläumsstiftung and the University of Vienna.