Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Wurst

Curriculum Vitae

Professor Wurst studied Biologiy/Chemistry at the University of Freiburg, Germany. He started his career as a PhD student at the Max-Planck-Institute of Immunobiology, Freiburg, and graduated in 1988 with a thesis at the Department of Immunogenetics, University Goettingen, Germany, in the laboratory of Prof. E. Guenther focusing on immunogenetics (Grade: summa cum laude).

As a post-doctoral fellow he joined the laboratory of Dr. A. Joyner at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute in Toronto, Canada, in 1989, studying neural pattern formation and developing gene targeting and gene trapping technologies. In 1994 he returned to Germany as Junior Research Group Leader at the Department of Mammalian Genetics, GSF Research Center, Neuherberg/Munich, and became leader of the Research Group ‘Molecular Neurogenetics’at the Max-Planck-Institute of Psychiatry from 1997 to 2002. Since 2002 he is director of the Institute of Developmental Genetics at the Helmholtz Zentrum München and Professor of Developmental Genetics, Dept. of Life Sciences, at the Technical University Munich.

During his education time from 1988-1991 he obtained a number of awards such as the DFG Postdoctoral Fellowship, the DAAD Postdoctoral Fellowship, a DFG Travel Award and a DFG Student fellowship.

He has coordinated or is coordinating following national and international research projects:
• Coordinator of German Gene Trap Consortium (GGTC; http://tikus.gsf.de/)
• Coordinator of European Conditional Mouse Mutagenesis Program (EUCOMM; http://www.eucomm.org/)
• Coordinator of the Tools for Functional Annotation of the Mouse Genome (EUCOMMTOOLS http://www.eucommtools.org/)
• Coordinator of the Helmholtz Alliance for Mental Health and Ageing (HelMA; http://www.neuro-ageing.de/)
• Coordinator of the “Disease Genes to Pathways” network (DiGtoP); funded by BMBF NGFN-plus (http://www.digtop.de/)
• Director of the Virtual Institute of Neurodegeneration (http://www.neuro-ageing.de/virtual-institute.php)

Prof. Wurst is member of the Editorial Board of Anatomy & Embryology and of a Special Edition of Drug Discovery Today.

In addition he was a member of the Faculty of 1000, German Neuroscience Society, Society of Neuroscience, German Genetic Society, International Gene Trap Consortium (IGTC), International Committee on Standardized Genetic Nomenclature for Mice, and founding member of the International Mouse Mutagenesis Consortium (IKMC) and is holder of a number of patents.