Kurt Wüthrich

Kurt Wüthrich ( born October 4, 1938 in Aarberg ) is a Swiss chemist and Nobel laureate.

Wüthrich attended the German School Biel and studied from 1957 to 1962 in Bern chemistry, physics and mathematics and a doctorate in 1964 at the University of Basel in the group of Silvio Fallab. He stayed at the University of California, Berkeley ( postdoctoral fellow with Professor Robert E. Connick, 1965-1967 ) and at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill ( Robert G. Shulman, 1967-1969 ). In 1969 he returned to Switzerland and worked from then on at the ETH in Zurich. There he became a lecturer in 1970, assistant professor in 1972, associate professor in 1976 and was finally appointed in 1980 as professor of biophysics.

Since 1987, Wüthrich Member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, since 2008 National Academy of Sciences. In 1991 he was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize -.

He was appointed in addition to the Cecil H. and Ida M. Green Visiting Professor of Structural Biology at the Scripps Research Institute in 2001.

Wüthrich became famous for his pioneering work on the structure determination of proteins by nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Along with John B. Fenn and Koichi Tanaka won him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded in 2002.