Sebastian Bonhoeffer
Sebastian Bonhoeffer (born 1965 in Tübingen, Germany) is a German biologist at the ETH Zürich and Principal of the Collegium Helveticum. Life and Works. Bonhoeffer studied music in Basle (under Heinrich Schiff) and physics in Munich und Vienna. In 1995 he did his doctorate with Martin A. Nowak under Robert May at the Institute of Zoology at the University of Oxford on the population dynamics and evolution of viral diseases. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oxford and Rockefeller University. In 1998 he was given his own research group at the Friedrich Miescher Institute  for Biomedical Research in Basle and then a professorship from the Swiss National Science Foundation at ETH Zurich. Since 2005 he has been Professor of Theoretical Biology at the Department of Environmental Systems Science. Since 2020 he has also been Principal of the Collegium Helveticum. Bonhoeffer is involved in the evolution and population biology of bacteria and viruses. He develops and analyses mathematical and computer-oriented models for the dynamics of infectious diseases. For example, he developed population-dynamic models of viral infections, which allowed important insights into the pathogenesis of HIV infection. More recent work deals with the development  and spread of antibiotic resistance. His group includes Tanja Stadler, Martin Ackermann and Marcel Salathé. In 2014 Bonhoeffer was invited to join the European Molecular Biology Organization, and in 2019 the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Sebastian Bonhoeffer is married to musician, Hanna Weinmeister, and they have two children.