Founder History

Ulrich Walter, MD; Professor and Chairman, Department of Clinical Biochemistry and Pathobiochemistry and Laboratory Medicine of the Bavarian Julius-Maximilians University Wuerzburg, Germany, www.ikbz.de.

He received his medical and biochemical training at the University of Goettingen (Germany), Brandeis University (Massachusetts, USA) and Yale University (New Haven, USA).

Since his postdoctoral years with the later Nobel laureate Paul Greengard (then at Yale University), his research interests are the signal transduction aspects of protein kinases, the cross talk of NO/cGMP-mediated signaling in cardiovascular cells, hemostasis and vascular pathobiochemistry. 

Prof. Dr Walter is member of the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina and has received numerous awards by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and currently coordinates the DFG-supported center grant “Mechanisms and imaging of cardiovascular cell-cell interactions”, www.sfb688.de.

Harald Schmidt, MD PhD RPh; Professor and Head of Department of Pharmacology, Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, Monash University, Australia, www.med.monash.edu.au/pharmacology.

He has many years of experience in NO and cGMP signaling and vascular pharmacology and physiology.

Amongst many scientific activities, he spent 3 years of his career at Abbott Labs in Chicago, USA working on the biochemistry and molecular biology of NO synthases together with the later Nobel laureate Ferid Murad.

In 1999, Dr Schmidt received the Research Prize of the German Society for Cell Biology; in 2000 the Phoenix Prize for Pharmaceutical Research.