About

I consider myself to be a “biophysicist”, a physicist in heart, interested in the question “what is life all about?” or a biologist trying to understand biology from the viewpoint of a physicist.

My training started in Tübingen and Köln Universities as a biochemist and geneticist with strong interest in physics and physical chemistry.

Soon I got interested in what is now called “Molecular Biology”. My PHD work was mainly in Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (director Nobel Laureate James D. Watson) on Long Island New York, USA.

As post doc I worked with Nobel Laureate Max Delbruck, at Caltech, Pasadena, USA. It was here where I started my first electrom microscopy and discovered, I had to develop my own microbeam techniques in order to be able to follow my biological interest in structure-function relationships.

In the German Forschungszentrum Jülich I started my own laboratory in 1977. After strong involvement in the biophysics of primary processes in animal photoreceptors for over 20 years I got interested in environmental research.

In the early 2000s I was involved in founding the Phytosphere Institute, that I subsequently joined as senior scientist to follow environmental questions in nutrient uptake and transport in plants. The institute later changed from bioecology to bioeconomy, and is now the Plant Sciences (IBG-2) institute, as part of the Institute for Bio- and Geosciences in the German Forschungszentrum Jülich.

Following my retirement in 2012 I started my own company and at present also act as visiting scientist at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY in Hamburg and at my former Institute IBG-2, in order to share my experience that I was able to collect, thanks to the long lasting support in the past by the Forschungszentrum Jülich and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

January 2013.

© Dr. Walter H. Schröder