Peer Bork

Peer is senior group leader and head (with C. Müller) of the Structural and Computational Biology unit at EMBL, a European research organization with headquarters in Heidelberg. In addition, he is honorary professor at the universities of Heidelberg and Würzburg as well as the Fudan university of Shanghai.

Peer received his PhD in Biochemistry (1990) and his Habilitation in Theoretical Biophysics (1995). His research group works in various areas of computational and systems biology with a focus on function prediction, comparative analysis and data integration. He has published more than 600 research articles, among them more than 80 in Nature, Science or Cell, and is among the most cited researchers in life sciences (>230.000 citations, H-factor of 203 in 2020). He is on the editorial board of a number of journals, including Science and Cell, and functions as senior editor of the journal Molecular Systems Biology.

Peer co-founded five successful biotech companies, two of which went public. More than 50 of his former associates now hold professorships or other group leader positions in prominent institutions all over the world. He received a number of awards, among them the "Nature award for creative mentoring" for his achievements in nurturing and stimulating young scientists and the prestigious "Royal Society and Académie des Sciences Microsoft award" for the advancement of science using computational methods. He further obtained two competitive ERC advanced investigator grants and is elected member of the German national academy of sciences (Leopoldina), the European molecular biology organization (EMBO) and the Academia Europaea.