Wilhelm Gruissem
President of the European Plant Science Organisation
Wilhelm Gruissem has been full Professor of Plant Biotechnology in the Institute of
Plant Sciences at the ETH Zürich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) since July
1, 2000. He was elected President of the European Plant Science Organization
(EPSO) in 2006.
Wilhelm Gruissem was born on March 9, 1952 in Duisburg, Germany. He studied
biology and chemistry at the University of Bonn and obtained his Ph.D. in 1979. After
two years as a research associate at the University of Marburg, he accepted a
postdoctoral fellowship for research in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and
Developmental Biology at the University of Colorado in Boulder, USA.
In 1983 he was appointed to the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley as
professor of plant biology. He was Chair of the Department of Plant and Microbial
Biology at UC Berkeley from 1993 to 1998, and from 1998 to 2000 he was Director
of a collaborative research program between the Department and the Novartis
Agricultural Discovery Institute in San Diego.
Since 2001 he is Co-Director of the Functional Genomics Centre Zurich. From 2004
to 2006 he was Chair of the Zurich-Basel Plant Science Centre.
His research focuses on systems approaches to understand pathways and
molecules involved in plant growth control. He also directs a biotechnology program
on trait improvement in cassava, rice and wheat. Together with colleagues in China
he is currently directing the Shanghai Centre for Cassava Biotechnology in China.
Wilhelm Gruissem is elected fellow of the American Association for the
Advancement of Sciences, member of learned societies, Editor of Plant Molecular
Biology and on the editorial boards of several journals. Together with his colleagues
Bob Buchanan and Russell Jones he published the acclaimed book ‘Biochemistry
and Molecular Biology of Plants’. He has received several prestigious awards,
including a price from the Eiselen Foundation in Germany for his trait improvement
work in cassava. In 2007 he was elected lifetime foreign member of the American
Society of Plant Biologists.