Long career

“Genetics star” Josef Penninger turns 60 years old

On Thursday, the founding director of the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA) of the Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) in Vienna and head of the Helmholtz Center for Infection Research celebrates his 60th birthday.

(Bild: APA/HZI/STEPHAN DUBLASKY)

Geneticist Josef Penninger is probably one of the best-known faces in the Austrian scientific community. Born on September 5, 1964 in Gurten, Upper Austria, the long-standing scientist now has almost 800 scientific publications to his name.

These include influential contributions, for example on the ACE2 receptor, which the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen uses to enter human cells, as well as on deciphering the important role of the endogenous protein RANKL in many bodily functions and diseases such as osteoporosis or breast cancer, or on the highly acclaimed development of 3D models of human blood vessels ("organoids") a few years ago.

From 1994 Penninger was Principal Investigator at the US genetic engineering company Amgen and at the same time Assistant Professor at the Institute of Immunology and Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto, where - after his habilitation in 1997 at the University of Innsbruck - he worked from 1998 as Associate Professor and later as Full Professor.

Career

Penninger completed his medical studies at the University of Innsbruck. In 1990, he completed his doctoral thesis under pathologist and gerontologist Georg Wick. With a scholarship, Penninger moved to the Ontario Cancer Institute as a post-doctoral fellow, where he worked for a total of four years. It was in Canada that the physician really got his career rolling. He was twice voted into the "Top 10" in the list of "Most Modern Scientists of the Year". The media named him the "Young leader in medicine in Canada" and ranked him among the "Ten most interesting people of the year 2000" or among the "Top 40 under 40".

In 2002, he returned to Austria and took over the IMBA in Vienna, which was founded in 2003 and developed into an internationally renowned research institute under his leadership. Many of his most important scientific publications were written in Vienna.

Last year, he then became Scientific Director of the German Helmholtz Center for Infection Research (HZI) based in Braunschweig. At the same time, the geneticist took on a "25 per cent professorship" for personalized medicine at the Medical University of Vienna. "I already work 70 to 80 hours a week, including weekends - it's very easy to reconcile," says the scientist.