Prof. em. Dr. Hans Peter Merkle

Hans P. Merkle was full Professor of Galenical Pharmacy in the Department of Pharmacy and later in the Department of Applied BioSciences at ETH Zurich, beginning in April 1989. He headed several interdisciplinary R&D projects in drug formulation and delivery. He retired end of January 2008.

Professor Merkle was born in 1943 in Bad Mergentheim, Germany. He studied pharmaceutical sciences at the University of Erlangen and earned his doctorate in 1971 at the ETH Zurich under Professor P. Speiser. He worked as a postdoc from 1972/1973 under Professor William I. Higuchi at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and completed habilitation at the University of Heidelberg in 1979. Previous to his appointment at the ETH Zurich, he was associate professor of pharmaceutical technology at the University of Bonn from 1983/1988 and full professor of pharmaceutical technology at the University of Frankfurt from 1988/1989. He was Chairman of the Department of Pharmacy at the ETH Zurich from 1991/1994. From 1992/2000 he was a member of the planning commission at the ETH, and he served as vice-president of this commission.

The research of his group focused on the (i) delivery of therapeutics through biological barriers, (ii) preformulation of therapeutic peptides and proteins, (ii) particulate vaccine delivery systems, e.g. for single-injection vaccines and DNA vaccines, and (iv) biodegradable polymeric systems for the localized delivery of growth factors for tissue engineering. He served on the boards of several scientific journals and was Fellow of the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists AAPS. He was also Adjunct Professor at the Royal Danish School of Pharmacy in Copenhagen.