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Walter Jakob Gehring is Professor at the Biozentrum Basel of the University of Basel, Switzerland. He obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Zurich in 1965 and after two years as a research assistant of Professor Ernst Hadorn he joined Professor Alan Garen's group at Yale University in New Haven as a postdoctoral fellow.
In 1969 he was appointed as an associate professor at the Yale Medical School and 1972 he returned to Switzerland to become a professor of developmental biology and genetics at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel. He was Secretary General of the European Molecular Biology Organization, President of the International Society for Developmental Biologists, a Foreign Member of the National Academy of the USA, Great Britain, France, Germany and Sweden. In 1997 he was awarded the March of Dimes Prize in Developmental Biology. In 2000 he received the Kyoto Prize for Basic Science. In 2002 he received the Balzan Prize for Developmental Biology.
Walter Gehring has mainly been involved in studies of Drosophila genetics and development, particularly in the analysis of cell determination in the embryo and transdetermination of imaginal discs. He has made significant contributions to the study of the heat shock genes, various transposons and the homeotic genes which are involved in the genetic control of development.
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