1975 – 1979 | Guest Professor for Cell Biology

Günther Gerisch studied biology at the “Freie Universität” in West Berlin and the Universities of Göttingen and Tübingen and subsequently earned his doctorate supervised by Wolfhard Weidel in the field of Cell Biology at the Max Planck Institute for Biology in Tübingen. He then began to research and teach as Assistant Professor of Zoology at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau in 1961. In 1969 Gerisch moved to the Friedrich Miescher Laboratory of the Max Planck Society in Tübingen as a junior group leader, before being appointed Guest Professor of Cell Biology at the Biozentrum, University of Basel, in 1975. Here he was committed, together with his research team, to investigating molecular changes of the cell surface during development. In 1979 Gerisch returned to Germany joining the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried, where he became Head of the Department of Cell Biology and a Director at the Institute. There he focused the work of his group on the dynamics and cellular functions of the cytoskeleton. Günther Gerisch reached emeritus status in 1999 but has since remained active in research and leads the research group Cell Dynamics.