Peer Bork
Director of EMBL Heidelberg
Peer is Director of EMBL Heidelberg and a senior group leader. He joined EMBL in 1991, and from 2001 to 2020 he was head of the Structural and Computational Biology unit (in the last years with Christoph Müller). He is an 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 (>330.000 citations, H-factor of >230 in 2023). He is on the editorial board of a number of journals, including Science and Cell, and functions as founding editor of the journal Molecular Systems Biology.
Peer has co-founded five successful biotech companies, two of which went public. More than 60 of his former associates now hold professorships or other group leader positions in prominent institutions all over the world. He has received a number of awards for different aspects of his work, among them the "Nature award for creative mentoring" for his achievements in nurturing and stimulating young scientists, the prestigious "Royal Society and Académie des Sciences Microsoft award" for the advancement of science using computational methods and the Novozymes prize for innovative contributions to biotechnology. He further obtained two competitive ERC advanced investigator grants and is an elected member of the German national academy of sciences Leopoldina, the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) and the Academia Europaea.