Roland Benz (born 1943 in Singen) is a German biophysicist.
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Benz studied Mathematics, Chemistry and Physics ] at the University of Würzburg. In 1972 he obtained his PhD in Biology under Peter Läuger at University of Konstanz and his [ Habilitation in Biophysics ] in 1977. As Heisenberg Fellowship of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) (German Science Foundation) he was Visiting Professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook (SUNYSB) in 1980 and 1982. In 1984 he was Visiting Professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
Since 1986 he has been full Professor of Biotechnology at the University of Würzburg. Since 2003 Benz is a Member in the European Graduate College "Gene regulation in and by microbial pathogens"and since 2005 a Member in the French-German Graduate College "Interference of pathogens with the host signalling machinery", both sponsored by the DFG.
Since 2009 he held the Wisdom Professorship at the Jacobs University Bremen. Since 2009 he is Research fellow at Rudolf Virchow Center, the DFG Research Center for Experimental Biomedicine and a central institution of the University of Würzburg.
His Research priorities are, in addition to construction, Peri plastic structure and organization of biological membranes and cell membranes he is interested in biophysical processes in the molecular basis of membrane proteins in microorganisms and higher organisms, with a special interest in pore-forming peptides and proteins. He has published numerous scientific papers.
He was Leader of several research projects:
He received in 2002 the Gay-Lussac/Humboldt Award de la Ministère de recherche français for the development of the German/French collaboration in Science. In 2007 he has been awarded Honorary Doctorate by the University of Barcelona[1]. 2011 he was honoured by the faculty of medicine at Umeå University[2] [3]