Univ.-Prof. Dr. Gerhard Ecker
Place of Birth: Seitenstetten (Lower Austria)
Nationality: Austria
Bibliographic Sketch
Gerhard Ecker is Professor of Pharmacoinformatics and Head of the Pharmacoinformatics Research Group at the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Vienna. Gerhard received his doctorate in natural sciences from the University of Vienna and performed his post-doctoral training at the group of J. Seydel in Borstel (Germany). His research focuses on computational drug design with special emphasis on drug-transporter interaction and in silico safety assessment. He participated in 5 EU-funded projects related to toxicology and coordinated the Open PHACTS project, which created an Open Pharmacological Space by semantic integration of public databases. Gerhard served 2009 – 2011 as President of the European Federation for Medicinal Chemistry, and from 2018 – 2022 as Dean at the Faculty of Life Sciences.
Education and Career
| 1981-1986 | Study of Pharmacy, University of Vienna |
| 1986-1991 | Ph.D. in Medicinal Chemistry |
| 1995 | Post-doc stay in the group of Prof. Seydel, Research Center, Borstel, Germany |
| 1998 | Habilitation for Pharmaceutical Chemistry, University of Vienna |
| 2004 - | Coordinator of the Research Focus „Computational Life Sciences“ at the Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Vienna |
| Oct 2009 | Appointment as full professor for Pharmacoinformatics, University of Vienna |
University Organization
| 2003-2009 | Member of the Senate of the University of Vienna, Vice Chair June 2006-2009 |
| 2014-2018 | Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Vienna |
| 2018-2022 | Dean of the Faculty of Life Sciences |
Societies
| 2003- | Member of the Executive Committee of the European Federation for Medicinal Chemistry, Secretary 2003 – 2007, President-elect 2008 |
| 2009-2011 | President of the European Federation for Medicinal Chemistry |
| 2013 | Awarded Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry |
Editor Molecular Informatics, Editor in Chief MedChemComm, Editorial Board member of several journals in the field
Coordinator of the Open PHACTS IMI project on semantic data integration, partner in the IHI projects eTOX, K4DD, eTRANSAFE, TransQST, ReSOLUTE, REsolution and in the H2020 projects EU-ToxRisk and Risk-Hunt3r. Speaker of the FWF doctoral programme “Molecular Drug Targets”, partner in the FWF project InSilify DrugTox and the Vienna Business Agency project AI4HEALTH.
At present 190 full papers, >250 conference contributions and 160 invited lectures, mainly related to pharmacoinformatic studies on the molecular basis of drug-transporter interaction, protein homology modelling and molecular dynamics simulations of transmembrane transporters, machine learning and neural networks in drug design, and semantic data integration and knowledge management.