Wolf B. Frommer

Plant molecular biology

In order to absorb nutrients and carry them through the membranes in their cells, plants use transport proteins. Understanding them is one of the keys to increasing yields and finding new fertilisers. One of the leading experts in this area is the plant biologist, Wolf B. Frommer. He investigates different transport mechanisms, such as the so-called SWEET proteins, which channel glucose through the membranes. This mechanism operates very similarly in animal and human cells, too. Frommer’s work is thus also relevant to medical applications such as understanding metabolic processes in cancer cells.

Brief bio

Prof. Dr. Wolf B. Frommer, born in Germany in 1958, is a Professor in the Department of Plant Biology at Stanford University, USA, where he was also the Director of the Carnegie Institution for Science until the beginning of 2016. After completing his doctorate at the University of Cologne, he moved to Freie Universität Berlin where he took his Habilitation in 1994. As early as 1992, he became a group leader at the Institute of Gene Biology Research (now known as Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology in Golm, Potsdam), Berlin, and from 1992, an Assistant Professor funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology. In 1996, he was appointed to a Full Professorship in Plant Physiology at the University of Tübingen where he also became the Founding Director of the Centre for Plant Molecular Biology in 1997. In 2003, he moved to Stanford University, USA. Amongst others, Frommer received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize in 1998, the Körber European Science Prize in 2001 and 2018 the Tsungming Tu Award. He has been a member of the Leopoldina - German National Academy of Sciences since 2015. In April 2017 he took up his position as a Humboldt Professor at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. He also heads a group at the Institute for Transformative Biomolecules (ITbM) at Nagoya University, Japan.

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