Rudi Balling
Rudi Balling is a German geneticist. He is director of the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine at the University of Luxembourg.Biography
Following his abitur at the Geschwister-Scholl Gymnasium in Daun, Germany and military service, Rudi Balling studied Food Science from 1974 to 1980 at the University of Bonn, Germany and at the Washington State University in Pullman, USA. Afterwards Rudi Balling received his PhD for his studies on embryotoxicology at the RWTH Aachen and at the NIEHS.
From 1984 to 1986 Rudi Balling researched imprinting mechanisms in developmental biology with Prof. Dr. Janet Rossant at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute at the Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, Canada, one of the leading labs in that field. Afterwards he moved to the lab of Prof. Peter Gruss at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany where he was involved in clarifying morphogenetic mechanisms during development.
In 1991 Rudi Balling took his Habilitation and was appointed leader of a team in the Department of Prof. Dr. Davor Solter at the Max Planck Institute for Immunobiology in Freiburg, Germany. From 1993 until 2000 he was Director of the Institute for Mammalian Genetics at the GSF-Research Centre for Health and the Environment. In 1994 he accepted an extraordinary professorship at the RWTH Aachen, followed in 1998 by the Chair of Developmental Genetics at the Technical University of Munich.
From 2001 to 2009 Balling was Scientific Director of the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research, previously called Gesellschaft für Biotechnologische Forschung, in Braunschweig, Germany and an honorary professor at the Technical University of Braunschweig. Under his leadership the center shifted its focus to infection research that pursued previously of biotechnology.
In September 2009 Rudi Balling became Director of the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine.
About 176 of his publications are listed in the Science Citation Index. These have been cited more than 14000 times. Rudi Balling's Hirsch-Index is 62.Honors and prizes
- Ordre de Mérite, Luxembourg
- Adjunct Professor, National Institute of Genetics, Mishima, Japan
- Guest Professor, College of Life Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, China
- Member of the Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften
- Honorary Member der Japanese Society of Inherited Metabolic Disease
- Honorary Member der Association of American Anatomists
- Friedrich Wilhelm Preis der RWTH Aachen
- DFG-Scholarship, Mount Sinai Research Institute, Toronto, Canada
- DAAD-Postgraduate Scholarship, NIEHS, N.C., United States
- Fulbright Scholarship and Exchange-Scholarship of the University of Bonn and Washington State University, Pullman, Washington, United States
- President of the Verband der Biologie, Biowissenschaften und Biomedizin in Deutschland
- President of the Verband der biowissenschaftlichen und biomedizinischen Fachgesellschaften
- President of the Deutschen Gesellschaft für Genetik
- President of the International Mammalian Genome Society
Rudi Balling is a member of several senats and advisory boards.
