David Baltimore is an American biologist, university administrator, and 1975 Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine. He is President Emeritus and Distinguished Professor of Biology at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he served as president from 1997 to 2006. He also served as the director of the Joint Center for Translational Medicine, which joined Caltech and UCLA in a program to translate basic scientific discoveries into clinical realities. He also formerly served as president of Rockefeller University from 1990 to 1991, founder and director of the Whitehead Institute of Biomedical Research from 1982 to 1990, and was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2007.
ETH Zurich is a public research university in Zürich, Switzerland. Founded by the Swiss federal government in 1854, it was modeled on the École polytechnique in Paris, with the stated mission to educate engineers and scientists; the school focuses primarily on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, although its 16 departments span a variety of disciplines and subjects.
Luk Van Parijs was an associate professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Center for Cancer Research. After investigating for a year, MIT fired Van Parijs for research misconduct. Van Parijs admitted to fabricating and falsifying research data in a paper, several unpublished manuscripts, and grant applications. In March 2011, Van Parijs pleaded guilty in a U.S. District Court in Boston to one count of making a false statement on a federal grant application. The government asked Judge Denise Casper for a 6-month jail term because of the seriousness of the fraud, which involved a $2-million grant. After several prominent scientists including Van Parijs' former post-doc supervisor pleading for clemency on his behalf, on 13 June, Van Parijs was finally sentenced six months of home detention with electronic monitoring, plus 400 hours of community service and a payment to MIT of $61,117 - restitution for the already-spent grant money that MIT had to return to the National Institutes of Health.
Sir David Charles Baulcombe is a British plant scientist and geneticist. As of 2017 he is a Royal Society Research Professor and Regius Professor of Botany in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge.
Theo Wallimann is a Swiss biologist who was research group leader and Adjunct-Professor at the Institute of Cell Biology ETH Zurich and later at the Institute of Molecular Health Science at the ETH Zurich at the Biology Department, of the ETH Zurich, Switzerland.
Kirsten Bomblies is an American biological researcher. Her research focuses primarily on species in the Arabidopsis genus, particularly Arabidopsis arenosa. She has studied processes related to speciation and hybrid incompatibility, and currently focuses on the adaptive evolution of meiosis in response to climate and genome change.
Carlo Maria Croce is an Italian-American professor of medicine at Ohio State University, specializing in oncology and the molecular mechanisms underlying cancer. Croce and his research have attracted public attention because of multiple allegations of scientific misconduct.
Anil Potti is a physician and former Duke University associate professor and cancer researcher, focusing on oncogenomics. He, along with Joseph Nevins, are at the center of a research fabrication scandal at Duke University. On 9 November 2015, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) found that Potti had engaged in research misconduct. According to Potti's voluntary settlement agreement with ORI, Potti can continue to perform research with the requirement of supervision until year 2020, while he "neither admits nor denies ORI's findings of research misconduct." As of 2020 Potti, who is employed at the Cancer Center of North Dakota, has had 11 of his research publications retracted, one publication has received an expression of concern, and two others have been corrected.
Silvia Bulfone-Paus is an Italian immunologist, who gained widespread attention in mainstream media for rampant scientific misconduct.
Nenad Ban is a Croatian biochemist born in Zagreb, Croatia who currently works at the ETH Zurich, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, as a professor of Structural Molecular Biology.
The EMBO Gold Medal is an annual award of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) given to young scientists for outstanding contributions to the life sciences in Europe. Laureates receive a medal and €10,000 and are invited to receive the award and present their research at the annual EMBO Meeting and to write a review published in The EMBO Journal. Medallists can only be nominated by EMBO Members.
Max Luciano Birnstiel was a Swiss molecular biologist who held a number of positions in scientific leadership in Europe, including the chair of the Institute of Molecular Biology at the University of Zurich from 1972–86, and that of founding director of the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna from 1986 to 1996. His research focused on gene regulation in eukaryotes. His research group is sometimes cited as the first to purify single genes, the ribosomal RNA genes from Xenopus laevis, three years before the successful isolation of the lac operon. He is also recognized for one of the earliest discoveries of a gene enhancer element. Birnstiel died in 2014 of heart failure during cancer treatment.
Dr. Jean-Christophe Leroux is a French-Canadian full professor of Drug Formulation and Delivery at the Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH Zürich. His research is mainly focused on broadening the field of drug delivery, and the development of biodetoxification systems for the treatment of metabolite disorders. Additionally, he has made important contributions to the field of biomaterials for use in drug delivery.
Kenichiro Itami is a Japanese chemist. He is a professor at Nagoya University in the Department of Chemistry, Graduate School of Science, director of Institute of Transformative Bio-Molecules (WPI-ITbM), Nagoya University and the Research Director of the Itami Molecular Nanocarbon Project (JST-ERATO). He received his Ph.D in Engineering from the Department of Synthetic Chemistry and Biological Chemistry from Kyoto University.
The Rössler Prize, offered by the ETH Zurich Foundation, is a monetary prize that has been awarded annually since 2009 to a promising young tenured professor of the ETH Zurich in the middle of an accelerating career. The prize of 200,000 Swiss Francs is financed by the returns from an endowment made by Max Rössler, an alumnus of the ETH. The prize money has to be used for the research of the laureate.
Sophie Jamal is a Canadian endocrinologist and former osteoporosis researcher who was at the centre of a scientific misconduct case in the mid-to-late 2010s. Jamal published a high-profile paper suggesting that the heart medication nitroglycerin was a treatment for osteoporosis, and was later demonstrated to have misrepresented her results. She received a lifetime ban from receiving funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and was named directly in their disclosure report, becoming the first person mentioned by name by the institute for scientific misconduct. Jamal was later stripped of her medical license for two years, regaining it in a controversial 3–2 decision.
Eilika Weber-Ban is a German biochemist. Her research considers protein degradation pathways. She was elected to the European Molecular Biology Organization in 2021.
Renato Renner is a Swiss professor for Theoretical Physics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, where he is head of the Research Group for Quantum Information Theory. His research interests include Quantum Information and Computation, the Foundations of Quantum Physics and Quantum thermodynamics.
Paola Picotti is an Italian biologist who is Professor for Molecular Systems Biology at ETH Zürich. She is Deputy Head of the Institute for Molecular Systems Biology. Her research investigates how the conformational changes of proteins impact cellular networks. She was awarded the 2020 ETH Zürich Rössler Prize and the 2019 EMBO Gold Medal.
