Prof. Harald zur Hausen
Professor Harald zur Hausen studied Medicine at the Universities of Bonn, Hamburg and Düsseldorf and received his M.D. He worked as postdoc at the Institute of Microbiology in Düsseldorf, then as Assistant Professor in the Virus Laboratories of the Children's Hospital in Philadelphia, senior scientist at the Institute of Virology of the University of Würzburg, and as Chairman and Professor of Virology at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg. In 1977 he moved to a similar position to the University of Freiburg. From 1983 until 2003 he was appointed as Scientific Director of the Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum (German Cancer Research Center) in Heidelberg.
Professor zur Hausen has a special interest in infection-induced malignancies. He showed the role of papillomaviruses in cervical cancer and discovered a larger number of novel virus types.
He received numerous national and international awards, including the Robert-Koch-Prize, the Charles S. Mott Prize of the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation, and the Federation of the European Cancer Societies Clinical Research Award, the William B. Coley Award for Distiguished Research in Basic Immunology of the Cancer Research Institute, the Prince Mahidol-Award, and the Warren Alpert-Prize of the Harvard University.
Harald zur Hausen holds seven Honorary Degrees. He is an elected member of various academies, such as LEOPOLDINA, Academia Europaea, Heidelberg Academy of Sciences, Polish Academy of Sciences, Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), and of research organizations including EMBO and HUGO.
He has memberships in Editorial Boards of several journals and is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Cancer. In October 2008, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine.