Biography
After severe illness, Willy Krek passed away on August 29, 2018, at the age of 56.
He was the founding chair of the Insitute of Molecular Health Sciences and instrumental for the development of molecular health sciences and personalised medicine at ETH Zurich. The Institute of Molecular Health Sciences has lost a passionate researcher, colleague and friend.
Wilhelm Krek was Full Professor of Cell Biology at ETH Zurich from 2003 till 2018. He was born in 1962 in Klagenfurt/Austria and studied Chemistry at the Technical University Graz/Austria. After his PhD studies at the Swiss Cancer Institute in Lausanne/Switzerland, he spent several years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute/Harvard Medical School in Boston/USA. In 1995, Wilhelm Krek joined the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel/Switzerland as an independent investigator.
His research interest focused on the biology of hypoxia signaling in the progression of malignant and metabolic disorders and on converting aspects of their discoveries into screens for small molecule probes targeting tumor subtypes. For his work on cell signaling and disease mechanisms, Wilhelm Krek received several honors including the Robert Wenner Prize, the Friedrich Miescher Medal, the International Steiner Cancer Research Award and the Swiss Bridge Award. He is elected member of EMBO and the American Association for Cancer Research. Wilhelm Krek was co-founder and founding chair of the Institute of Molecular Health Sciences and of the NEXUS Personalized Health Technologies Platform at ETH Zurich. He also co-founded the Zurich Center for Personalized Medicine and the ETH spin-offs ProteoMediX and Tolremo.