Otmar D. Wiestler is a German physician, a professor at the University of Heidelberg and president of the Helmholtz Association. He is not a typical basic scientist, but he successfully entered a number of highly popular fields of clinical research, including cancer research, tumor genetics and, more recently, stem cell research. He focuses on technology transfer of already existing technologies from basic science into clinical use, rather than developing the basic science.
Matthias Werner Hentze is a German scientist. He is the director of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), co-director of the Molecular Medicine Partnership Unit between EMBL and Heidelberg University, and Professor of Molecular Medicine at Heidelberg University.
Christoph Matthias Schmidt is a German economist. He has been President of RWI - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research in Essen since 2002 and also holds the Chair for Economic Policy and Applied Econometrics at the Faculty of Management and Economics at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. He was a member of the German Council of Economic Experts from 2009 to 2020 and its chairman from 2013 to 2020. Since 2019 he has been a member, and since 2020 co-chairman, of the Franco-German Council of Economic Experts. From 2011 to 2013, he was a member of the Enquete Commission "Growth, Prosperity, Quality of Life" of the German Bundestag. From 2020 to 2021 he was a member of the "Corona-Expertenrat" of the Minister President of North Rhine-Westphalia. He has been a member of acatech – Deutsche Akademie der Technikwissenschaften since 2011, a member of the presidium since 2014, and vice president since 2020. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature and the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Dorothee Kern, is a professor of Biochemistry at Brandeis University and former player for the East German national basketball team.
Stefan Hugo Ernst Kaufmann is a German immunologist and microbiologist and is one of the highly cited immunologists worldwide for the decade 1990 to 2000. He is amongst the 0.01% most cited scientists of c. 7 million scientists in 22 major scientific fields globally.
Stefanie Dimmeler is a German biologist specializing in the pathophysiological processes underlying cardiovascular diseases. Her awards and honours include the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation for her work on the programmed cell death of endothelial cells. Since 2008 she has led the Institute for Cardiovascular Regeneration at the University of Frankfurt. Her current work is focusing to develop cellular and pharmacological strategies to improve cardiovascular repair and regeneration. Her work aims to establish non-coding RNAs as novel therapeutic targets.
Frank Neese is a German theoretical chemist at the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research. He is the author of more than 440 scientific articles in journals of Chemistry, Biochemistry and Physics. His work focuses on the theory of magnetic spectroscopies and their experimental and theoretical application, local pair natural orbital correlation theories, spectroscopy oriented configuration interaction, electronic and geometric structure and reactivity of transition metal complexes and metalloenzymes. He is lead author of the ORCA quantum chemistry computer program. His methods have been applied to a range of problems in coordination chemistry, homogeneous catalysis, and bioinorganic chemistry.
The Institute of Molecular Biology (IMB) is a modern research centre on the campus of the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. It is funded by the Boehringer Ingelheim Foundation and the state of Rheinland Palatinate. The scientists at IMB primarily conduct basic science in developmental biology, epigenetics, ageing, genome stability and related areas.
Jörg Hinrich Hacker is a German microbiologist. He served as president of the Robert Koch Institute from 2008 to 2010 and of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina from 2010 to 2020. He is the editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Medical Microbiology.
Jörg Vogel is a German scientist in the field of RNA biology and microbiology. He is Professor and Director of the Institute for Molecular Infection Biology (IMIB) at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, Germany. Since 2017, he has also headed the Helmholtz-Institut für RNA-basierte Infektionsforschung, the world’s first research institution to combine RNA and infection research.
Volker Haucke is a biochemist and cell biologist. He is Director of the Leibniz-Forschungsinstitut für Molekulare Pharmakologie Berlin (FMP) Berlin and Professor of Molecular Pharmacology at the Institute for Pharmacy of the Free University of Berlin.
Petra Schwille is a German professor and a researcher in the area of biophysics. Since 2011, she has been a director of the Department of Cellular and Molecular Biophysics at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany. She is known for her ground-laying work in the field of fluorescence cross-correlation spectroscopy, and numerous contributions on model membranes. Her current research focuses around bottom-up approaches to building an artificial cell within a broader area of synthetic biology. In 2010, Schwille received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize.
Rolf Heiner Schirmer was a German physician and biochemist. From 1980 to 2007 he was a professor of biochemistry in the medical faculty of Ruprecht-Karls University in Heidelberg, Germany, and became a professor emeritus.
Ralf F. W. Bartenschlager is a German virologist who has been researching hepatitis C since 1989. He is a professor in the Department of Infectious Diseases at the Heidelberg University.
Francine NtoumiPh.D., HDR, PvDz, FRCPedin is a Congolese parasitologist specializing in malaria. She was the first African person in charge of the secretariat of the Multilateral Initiative on Malaria (2006-2010). In recent years, she has become involved in research on other infectious diseases, including COVID-19.
Elena Conti is an Italian biochemist and molecular biologist. She serves as Director and Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany, where she uses structural biology and biophysical techniques to study RNA transport and RNA metabolism. Together with Elisa Izaurralde, she helped characterize proteins important for exporting mRNA out of the nucleus.
Helge Reinhold Braun is a German physician and politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Between 2018 and 2021, he served as Head of the Chancellery and Federal Minister for Special Affairs in the fourth coalition government of Chancellor Angela Merkel. He was the Parliamentary Secretary of State for Bureaucracy Reduction and Federal-State Relations at the Chancellery between 2013 and 2018.
Marina V. Rodnina is a German biochemist.
Georg Peters was a German physician, microbiologist and university professor. From 1992 until his fatal mountain accident he headed the Institute of Medical Microbiology at the University of Münster. He was an internationally recognised expert in the field of staphylococci and the infectious diseases caused by them, to which he had devoted himself since the beginning of his scientific career.
Lothar Heinz Wieler is a German veterinarian and microbiologist who served as president of the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) from 2015 to 2023. In this capacity, he advised the German Federal and State Governments on topics of public health, especially infection hazards, and on the containment of the COVID-19 pandemic.
