Eric Westhof
After obtaining a Bachelor's degree in Physical Sciences from the University of Liège, Éric Westhof carried out research work at Regensburg Universität (Germany) with a EURATOM scholarship in preparation for the doctorate he obtained from the University of Liège in 1974. Thanks to a Fullbright-Hays scholarship, he became a research associate at the University of Wisconsin until 1977 in the laboratory of Professor M. Sundaralingam. Then, with an EMBO scholarship, he joined in 1981 the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology of the National Scientific Research Centre (IBMC-CNRS), affiliated to the University Louis Pasteur (ULP-Strasbourg). In 1984, he was appointed CNRS research fellow and in 1988 he was appointed professor of structural biochemistry. From 2005 to 2016, he was director of the CNRS research unit "RNA Architecture and Reactivity" at the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology (IBMC), where he was director from 2006 to 2016. His research activities focus on the relationships between sequences, spatial structures, evolution and functions of RNA molecules.
From 2003 to 2007 he was president of the research commission of the Faculty of Life Sciences of the University Louis Pasteur, where he was an elected member of the Scientific Council between 2002-2006. He was elected Vice-President Research and Doctoral Training (2007-2008). He participated with Alain Beretz in the merger of the three universities of Strasbourg and became Vice-President Research and Doctoral Training of the University of Strasbourg between 2009 and 2012.
He is a member of EMBO (1998), the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (2000), the Academia Europaea (2001) and the Academy of Sciences (2011). He was a member of the Institut universitaire de France from 1995 to 2005, President of the RNA Society (2005) and President of the French Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from 2004 to 2008. He has received the Jacques MONOD Prize (Pasteur Institute, 1992), the Charles-Léopold Mayer Prize from the French Academy of Sciences (2007), the Feodor Lynen Medal from the Gesellschaft für Biochemie und Molekulare Biologie (2011), and the medal of the French Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (2014), the Lifetime Achievement Award of the RNA Society (2016), the Wang Ying Lai Prize of the Institute of Biochemistry, Academia sinica (Shanghai 2017), and the Rolf-SAMMET Prize of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, (Frankfurt-am-Main 2018). He is a Knight of the National Order of Merit (2015).
Eric Westhof is executive editor of the RNA Journal (CSHP), Nucleic Acids Research (OUP), Biochemical and biophysical research communications (Elsevier) and the Journal of Molecular Recognition (Wiley).