Dr. Heini Murer was born in 1944 in Beckenried, Switzerland. He earned his Master of Science in Biology and his PhD in Biochemistry at Fribourg University, followed by a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Laboratory of Biochemistry at ETH Zurich. In 1975 he joined the Max Planck Institute in Frankfurt and became a member of the Renal Physiology Laboratory. In 1978 he began leading his own research group at the Max Planck Institute.
In 1979, Dr. Murer joined the faculty of the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Fribourg as an Assistant Professor, and in 1981 he became a professor (Extraordinarius) at the Institute of Physiology of the University of Zurich, where he was awarded full professorship (Ordinarius) in 1996, and was Head of the Department for eight years. From March 2006 to August 2010, Heini Murer served as Vice-President (Prorektor) for Medicine and the Sciences at the University of Zurich. In August 2010 he became a Professor Emeritus.
Dr. Murer is the author/co-author of over 450 research-publications and has served on the Editorial Boards of leading scientific journals in his field. He was Editor-in-Chief of Pflügers Archiv-European Journal of Physiology from 2001 to 2006. Currently, he is an Associate Editor of PHYSIOLOGY (American Society of Physiology).
Dr. Murer has been awarded various prizes and honours over the last twenty years, which include: Cloëtta Prize (Switzerland), Homer Smith Award (USA), Otto Nägeli Prize (Switzerland), Adolf Fick Prize (Germany), Franz Volhard Medal (Germany), Robert Berliner Lectureship (Yale University; USA) and Robert Berliner Award (American Physiological Society), Robert Pitts Memorial Lectureship (IUPS; USA), Donald W. Seldin Award (National Kidney Foundation; USA), Richard Award (International Society of Nephrology), Borrelli Medaille (Italy) , ERA-EDTA Award for Outstanding Scientific Achievements (Eurpean Renal Association), Bene Merenti University Medal (University Regensburg, Germany), Johann-Melchior-Wyrsch Prize (Switzerland). He is an Honorary Member of the American Physiological Society and a member of the Academia Europea, the German Academy Leopoldina and the Swiss Academy for Medical Sciences (SAMW). He holds Honorary Doctorates from the University of Patras (Greece, 2016) and the University of Regensburg (Germany, 2016). He was member and president of the “biology and medicine” division of the research council of the Swiss National Science Foundation (1993-2004), chaired the program committee of the World Congress of Nephrology in Berlin 2003 (9000 participants), and the Gordon Research Conference on Membrane Transport Proteins in 2004. Until 2014 he was the co-chairperson of the Scientific Advisory Board of EDTA-ERA (European Renal Association) and until 2014 served on the selection panel for “Starting Grants” and ‘Consolidator Grants” of the European Research Council (ERC). Until August 2016 he also served as a Founding Director of the Graduate Campus of the University of Zürich, a newly formed institution aiming to advance the quality of doctoral studies and to foster interactions between different disciplines and different Graduate Schools (www.grc.uzh.ch).