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 Chemistry, University of Vienna. He also coordinates the research focus “Computational Life Sciences” of the Faculty of Life Sciences. 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 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 is currently Dean at the Faculty of Life Sciences. Very recently, he founded the company Phenaris, which leverages linked open data for safety assessment of drug candidates.

Education and Career

University Organization

Societies

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 IMI projects eTOX, K4DD, eTRANSAFE, TransQST, ReSOLUTE, and in the H2020 project EU-ToxRisk. Deputy speaker of the FWF doctoral programme “Molecular Drug Targets” (since 2019 speaker), partner in the SFB “Transmembrane Transporters in Health and Disease”

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.