Eckard Wimmer
| Eckard Wimmer | |
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| Born |
22 May 1936 Berlin, Germany |
| Residence | New York |
| Fields | Biology, Virology |
| Institutions | Stony Brook University |
| Alma mater | Göttingen University |
| Known for | First de novo synthesis of Poliovirus |
| Notable awards |
M.W. Beijerinck Virology Prize 2011 Koch Gold Medal 2012 |
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Website www |
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Eckard Wimmer (born 22 May 1936) is a German American virologist, organic chemist and distinguished professor of molecular genetics and microbiology at Stony Brook University. He is best known for his seminal work on the molecular biology of poliovirus and the first chemical synthesis of a viral genome capable of infection and subsequent production of live viruses.
Eckard Albert Friedrich Wimmer was born on May 22, 1936 in Berlin, Germany. At the onset of World War II, Wimmer at age three lost his father; at age nine, his mother fled together with his two older brothers to Saxony, East Germany, where he finished elementary school and high school. He studied Chemistry at the from 1953 to 1956, and then fled to West Germany to continue his Chemistry studies at University of Göttingen. In 1962 he earned the degree of Doctor rerum naturalium (Dr. rer. nat.) in the Organic Chemistry of natural products under the guidance of .
Wimmer worked at the University of Göttingen as a research associate and instructor until 1964. Intrigued by the chemistry of living cells, however, he shifted his research interests in 1964 and joined Gordon Tener at the Department of Biochemistry of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, to study transfer RNA. Then in 1966 he worked with Manfred E. Reichmann in the Department of Botany at the University of Illinois to study plant viruses.
In 1968, during a five-months visit in David Baltimore’s laboratory at MIT, Wimmer was introduced to poliovirus, the infectious agent of his choice until today. Between 1968 and 1974 he taught and conducted research in the Department of Microbiology in the Saint Louis University School of Medicine in Missouri. He and his family moved to Stony Brook University on Long Island, NY, in 1974 to join the Department of Microbiology, School of Medicine, an academic environment in which he is still actively engaged today. In 1979 he was promoted to professor at Stony Brook University and from 1984 to 1999 he served as the Chairman of the Department. Wimmer was honored as a Distinguished Professor of the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 2002.
Wimmer is married since 1965 to Astrid née Brose, a German physical therapist, who earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Stony Brook University in 1988. They have two children.
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