Dr. Erwin Neher
Physiology/Medicine 1991
Dr. Erwin Neher serves as Director of the Membrane Biophysics Department at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Goettingen, Germany. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from the Institute of Technology in Munich and did postdoctoral research in the Physiology Department at Yale University. In 1989 he spent a sabbatical at the California Institute of Technology. His research interests have focused on studies of ion channels in neuronal signaling. More recently he studied mechanisms of hormone- as well as neurotransmitter-release and synaptic plasticity.
For his development of the patch clamp technique for recording of ion channel activity he received the 1991 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (together with Bert Sakmann). He is a member, or foreign member of several national and international academies, among them the Academia Europaea, the National Academy of Sciences (USA), and the Royal Society, London.
