Prof. em. Dr. Fritz K. Winkler

Fritz K. Winkler has been full Professor for Structural Biology at the Biology Department of the ETH Zurich since November 1, 1999. He is Head of the Life Sciences Department at the Paul Scherrrer Institute in Villigen.

Fritz Winkler was born in 1944 in Zürich where he studied chemistry at the ETH and earned his Ph.D. in 1973 with a dissertation under Prof. J.D. Dunitz. He then spent 3 years as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Prof. S. Harrison in the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Department at Harvard University. After another year at the ETH in Zürich, he joined the EMBL at Heidelberg in 1978 for six years as a group leader in the Structural Biology Department. In 1985 he joined F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG in Basle where he established and led a protein crystallography group in Preclinical Pharmaceutical Research. From 1995 1999 he was in charge of the Molecular Structure Department with responsibility for support in biostructural research and chemical analytics.

The major research interest of Fritz Winkler is the understanding of the function and properties of biological macromolecules on the basis of detailed structural knowledge. X-ray crystallography is used to determine structures at atomic resolution. The structural insights will be useful for applications in protein engineering and drug discovery.