Institute of Inorganic Chemistry
Staff

Prof. Dr. Roland K. O. Sigel

University of Zürich
Institute of Inorganic Chemistry
Winterthurerstrasse 190
CH-8057 Zürich

Office: 34-F-36
Lab: 34-F-74/76/78
Phone: +41 44 63 546 52
Fax: +41 44 63 568 02/03
E-Mail: roland.sigel@aci.unizh.ch
Sigel Lab Webpage
Detailed CV as pdf file

Curriculum vitae:

Roland K. O. Sigel was born 26.11.1971 in Basel, Switzerland. He grew up in a small village near Basel, where he also visited elementary and completed high school in 1990. From 1991 to 1995, he studied Chemistry at the University of Basel with Biology and Biochemistry as a minor subject, and a Diploma Thesis in Organic Chemistry.

He received his doctoral degree summa cum laude (1999) from the University of Dortmund, Germany, working with Bernhard Lippert in the field of Bioinorganic Chemistry on the effect of metal ion binding on the acid-base and hydrogen bonding properties of nucleobases. Thereafter he spent nearly three years as a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University, New York, USA, in the group of Anna Marie Pyle (now Yale University), where he started working with catalytic RNA, i.e. ribozymes. During the six years abroad he received several fellowships from various sources.

Since April 2003, Roland Sigel is Assistant Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Zürich, Switzerland, endowed with a Förderungsprofessur of the Swiss National Science Foundation. His research interests are in Bioinorganic Chemistry, i.e. at the interface between Coordination Chemistry, Structural Biology, and Biochemistry, thereby focusing on the interrelations between metal ions and ribozymes. The structural and catalytic impacts of metal ions on ribozymes, i.e. catalytic RNAs, are evaluated by applying a broad combination of tools, including biochemical syntheses, stability-constant measurements, kinetic methods, X-ray crystallography and to a large part NMR spectroscopy.

Roland K. O. Sigel was a co-editor of Volumes 43 and 44 of the Metal Ions in Biological Systems series and is co-editing now the new series Metal Ions in Life Sciences (Wiley, Chichester, UK).

News:

September 6, 2008, Roland Sigel is awarded the Eurobic9 Medal at the occasion of the 9th European Conference in Bioinorganic Chemistry (Eurobic9) in Wroclaw, Poland. He receives this award in recognition for "his contributions to further the basic understanding of metal-ion interactions with nucleic acids".