Prof. Dr. Mia Terashima has been Professor of Cell and Molecular Biology at the Berliner Hochschule für Technik since 2021.
She began her academic career by earning a Bachelor of Science in Molecular and Cell Biology from Haverford College, USA. She subsequently completed her doctorate at the University of Münster, Germany, graduating summa cum laude. Her doctoral research focused on anaerobic metabolism in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. Before joining the Berliner Hochschule für Technik, she served as an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Low Temperature Science at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan.
During her time at Hokkaido University, Prof. Terashima's research focused on elucidating the interactions between algae and bacteria in alpine snowfields and investigating the effects of light on psychrophilic heterotrophic bacteria.
Prior to this appointment, she worked as a researcher at the Bioproduction Research Institute of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Sapporo, Japan, from 2014 to 2015. Her research there focused on the isolation of polyphosphate-accumulating microorganisms from wastewater.
From 2011 to 2013, Prof. Terashima was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Plant Biology at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California, USA.
Her research has been published in numerous peer-reviewed scientific journals and covers topics including triacylglycerol accumulation in Chlamydomonas, calcium-dependent regulation of photosynthetic electron transport, and proteomic analyses of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii chloroplasts.
Prof. Terashima has extensive experience supervising doctoral researchers and has participated in numerous competitive research projects. Her work has been supported by several prestigious grants, including the IFAF-EXPLORATIV Grant (2023), the JSPS Young Investigator Grant (2018), and the Institute of Low Temperature Science Exploratory Research Grant (2016–2018). Overall, she has secured more than €200,000 in competitive research funding from organizations including the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).
Since April 2022, Prof. Terashima has also served as a Visiting Lecturer at the Institute of Low Temperature Science at Hokkaido University, where she maintains an active research collaboration with the Microbial Ecology Group.
