Gerhard Rechkemmer

Gerhard Rudolf Rechkemmer (born August 21, 1951 in Heilbronn ) is a German nutritionist and physiologist. Since April 2007 he has been President of the Max Rubner Institute (MRI) , newly founded in 2008 , Federal Research Institute for Nutrition and Food (formerly Federal Research Institute for Nutrition and Food) with its headquarters in Karlsruhe and other locations in Kiel, Detmold and Kulmbach.

Rechkemmer studied at the University of Hohenheim and did his doctorate in physiology with Wolfgang von Engelhardt (1982). From 1980 he worked at the Physiological Institute of the University of Veterinary Medicine in Hanover . The German Research Foundation (DFG) funded a postdoctoral fellowship from 1984 to 1986 for a research stay at the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (USA) in the department of Professor Raymond A. Frizzell. After returning to the University of Veterinary Medicine in Hanover, he completed his habilitation in the field of physiology in 1989, received the license to teach (Venia legendi) and was appointed private lecturer.

From 1992 to 1994 he headed the functional analysis department at the Lower Saxony Institute for Peptide Research (IPF) with Wolf-Georg Forssmann. In 1994 he was appointed adjunct professor at the University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover.

In 1995 he was offered the position of director and professor and headed the Institute for Nutritional Physiology at the Federal Research Institute for Nutrition in Karlsruhe until the end of 2002. In 2000, he was appointed adjunct professor for physiology at the University of Karlsruhe . In 2003 he accepted a call to the newly created endowed professorship (C4) for the biofunctionality of food at the Weihenstephan Science Center at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). From there in 2007 he moved to the Federal Research Institute for Nutrition as President, and from 2008 to the Max Rubner Institute. He retired in 2016.

His main area of ​​work is studies on the nutritional effects of bioactive food ingredients.

Memberships

Gerhard Rechkemmer is a member of numerous scientific advisory boards and societies, including a. the German Society for Nutrition , the German Physiological Society, the German Society for Nutritional Medicine , the American Society for Nutrition.

• Since 2012 Chairman of the Extended Board of the Rhine-Neckar Culinary Forum.
• Since 1986 he has been a Lifetime Member of the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory (MDIBL), Salsbury Cove, Maine (USA)
• From 1998 to 2002 he was the German delegate in the Committee of Experts on Nutrition, Food Safety and Consumer Health of the Council of Europe
• Since 2000 he has been a member or permanent guest of the Senate Commission for the Health Assessment of Food (SKLM) of the German Research Foundation.
• From 2010 to 2014 President of the Senate of the Federal Research Institutes of the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture . Vice President since 2014.
• Founding member and until 2013 on the board of the German Agricultural Research Alliance (DAFA)
• From 2004 to 2014 he was Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of Nutrition, Europe's leading scientific journal for nutritional science.
• He has been an honorary member of the Board of Directors of the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI) Europe since 2011 and of the Board of Trustees of ILSI Global since 2013.
• 2014 member of the Bioeconomy Strategy Commission of the State of Baden-Württemberg

Awards

• 1988 Awarded the Gustav Rosenberger Memorial Prize by the University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover
• 2007 Appointment as honorary professor at the University of Karlsruhe, the current Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) .

Web links

• Profile of Rechkemmer at the Max Rubner Institute