Erwin Neher

Erwin Neher is a German biophysicist specializing in cell physiology, born in Landsberg am Lech in 1944. He studied physics at the Technical University of Munich, spent a year at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on a Fulbright scholarship, and took up research at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, where he met Bert Sakmann. In 1991 the two received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries concerning the function of single ion channels in cells, made possible by the patch clamp technique. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and received the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University in 1986.