The Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres is the largest scientific organisation in Germany. It is a union of 18 scientific-technical and biological-medical research centers. The official mission of the Association is "solving the grand challenges of science, society and industry". Scientists at Helmholtz therefore focus research on complex systems which affect human life and the environment. The namesake of the association is the German physiologist and physicist Hermann von Helmholtz.
The Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, or Leibniz Prize, is awarded by the German Research Foundation to "exceptional scientists and academics for their outstanding achievements in the field of research". Since 1986, up to ten prizes have been awarded annually to individuals or research groups working at a research institution in Germany or at a German research institution abroad. It is considered the most important research award in Germany.
Peter Gruss is a German developmental biologist, president of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, and the former president of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft.
Werner Wilhelm Franke was a German biologist and a professor of cell and molecular biology at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg. He was an anti-doping pioneer in Germany.
Stefan Walter Hell HonFRMS is a Romanian-German physicist and one of the directors of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2014 "for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy", together with Eric Betzig and William Moerner.
University Hospital Heidelberg is a university hospital in Heidelberg, Germany and is with 1,991 beds one of the largest medical centers in the country. It is closely linked to Heidelberg University Medical School which was founded in 1388 and is thus the oldest within the Federal Republic of Germany.
Harald zur Hausen NAS EASA APS was a German virologist. He carried out research on cervical cancer and discovered the role of papilloma viruses in cervical cancer, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2008. He was chairman of the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg.
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.
The Meyenburg Prize is awarded for outstanding achievements in cancer research by the Meyenburg Foundation in support of the German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg (DKFZ), which is the largest biomedical research institution in Germany. The prize has been awarded annually since 1981, and currently has an honorarium of €50,000.
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.
Peter Heinrich Krammer is a German immunologist and one of the directors of The National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT), as well as the head of the Division Immunogenetics at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg. Peter H. Krammer is well known for his research and findings in apoptosis. He and his lab members discovered the CD95 receptor and many other molecules involved in signaling through the CD95 receptor.
Lutz Gissmann is a German virologist and was head of the division Genome Modifications and Carcinogenesis at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg until his retirement in 2015. Lutz Gissmann is known for his seminal research in the field of human papillomaviruses (HPV) and their causal association with human cancer, especially cervical cancer. In his early work, he demonstrated genetic heterogeneity among HPV isolates leading the way to the now well-established concept of distinct HPV types of which some are associated with specific benign or malignant disease. In the early 1980s in the laboratory of later Nobel Prize laureate Harald zur Hausen he was the first to isolate and characterize HPV16 and HPV18, the two most oncogenic HPV types causing the vast majority of HPV-induced anogenital and head-and-neck cancers. This groundbreaking work of Lutz Gissmann provided experimental evidence for the causal association of specific HPV types with human cancer, and laid the foundation for the development of prophylactic HPV vaccines for the prevention of cervical cancer and other HPV-induced cancers. His current research interest is on development of second generation prophylactic and therapeutic HPV vaccines.
Martina Pötschke-Langer (1951–2022) was a German public health activist.
Cornelia "Neli" Ulrich is executive director of the Comprehensive Cancer Center at Huntsman Cancer Institute (HCI), Jon M. and Karen Huntsman Presidential Professor in Cancer Research, and former Division Chief of Cancer Population Sciences in the Department of Population Health Sciences at the University of Utah. Ulrich oversees HCI's academic consortium of nearly 200 cancer research teams. She leads efforts to advance the impact of HCI's research in laboratory, clinical and population science, with the goal of improving cancer prevention and treatment. Prior to joining HCI, she was the director and department head of preventive oncology at the National Center of Tumor Diseases (NCT) and German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg. During this time, she also held a Professorship at the DKFZ and University of Heidelberg. From 1993 until 2009, Ulrich was a Member of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Professor in Epidemiology at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Hartmut Beug (1945–2011) was a German cancer biologist who studied how groups of oncogenes interact to lead to the development and spread of cancer. Shortly before his death, a foundation was set up in his and his wife’s name to support collaboration among young scientists and their studies in the field of metastasis.
The Organisation of European Cancer Institutes (OECI) is an international non-profit organization with European Economic Interest Grouping status. It was created in 1979 to promote greater cooperation among European cancer centers and institutes. Its head office is located in Brussels at the Belgian University Foundation.
Jan O. Korbel is a German scientist working in the fields of Human Genetics, Genomics and Computational Biology. He is a tenured principal investigator and Head of Data Science at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory Heidelberg, Germany, senior scientist in the Genome Biology Unit, is leading a bridging research division at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), and is an honorary professor ("Honorarprofessor") at Heidelberg University. A particular focus of the Korbel group is on investigating a particular form of mutation, genomic structural variation, which includes deletions, inversions and more complex chromosomal rearrangements such as chromothripsis events that can occur in healthy individuals and in context of disease. His group's principal research objective is to understand genomic structural variations as a basis of phenotypic variation and cancer development.
Fabian Kiessling is a German radiologist, university lecturer and author as well as a scientist in the field of molecular imaging.
Uğur Şahin is a German oncologist and immunologist. He is the founder and CEO of BioNTech, which developed one of the major vaccines against COVID-19. His main fields of research are cancer research and immunology.
