Erwin Neher(1944) is a German biophysicist, specializing in the field of cell physiology. For significant contribution in the field, in 1991 he was awarded, along with Bert Sakmann, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for "their discoveries concerning the function of single ion channels in cells".
Biography and his Studies
Neher was born in Landsberg am Lech, Upper Bavaria, the son of Elisabeth (nee Pfeiffer), a teacher, and Franz Xaver Neher, an executive at a dairy company.He studied physics at the Technical University of Munich from 1963 to 1966.
In 1966, he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study in the US. He spent a year at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and earned a Masters Degree in Biophysics.
In 2003 Neher was one of 22 Nobel Laureates who signed the Humanist Manifesto.
Research Career
In 1986, he was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University together with Bert Sakmann. In 1987, he received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which is the highest honour awarded in German research. Along with Bert Sakmann, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1991 for "their discoveries concerning the function of single ion channels in cells".Neher and Sakmann were the first to record the currents of single ion channels on a live cell (they were first recorded using the lipid bilayer method) through their development of the patch-clamp technique,a project Neher began as a postdoctoral associate in the laboratory of Charles F. Stevens at Yale.
He is now a director at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Gottingen and heads its Department for Membrane Biophysics. He is also a Professor at the University of Gottingen and a co-chair of the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Gottingen.
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1991)
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize (1987)
Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize (1986)
