[3dem] Andreas Engel

[Henning Stahlberg]

Dear colleagues,

With deep sadness I share the news that Andreas Engel passed away last Wednesday, at the age of 82, after a courageous fight against an aggressive caner. Only half a year ago, he was out hiking in the Italian mountains with his wife Barbara, walking 160 km in a single week.

Andreas trained as a physicist in Bern, Switzerland, before heading to John Hopkins University in Baltimore for his postdoctoral work. He then led a research group at the Biozentrum in Basel, and in 1985 took on the role of a group leader in research and development at Ilford Ltd. in Fribourg, Switzerland.

In 1987, he joined forces with his colleague Ueli Aebi to establish the Maurice E. Müller Institute at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel. Together, Ueli and Andreas served as professors for structural biology there for almost a quarter century, leaving a lasting mark on the field of structural biology as we know it today.

Andreas Engel was a true pioneer. He was among the first to apply atomic force microscopy (AFM) with the tip operating under water, and one of the earliest researchers to perform 3D reconstructions using scanning transmission electron microscopy, achieving remarkable high-resolution maps of porin 2D crystals by STEM. He became a leading expert in membrane protein 2D crystallization, and his group played a key role in the determination of the first aquaporin structure, in collaboration with Peter Agre and Yoshinori Fujiyoshi.

As he approached retirement from Basel, Andreas founded the Center for Cellular Imaging and NanoAnalytics (C-CINA) of the University of Basel, which in 2009 operated among others one of the very early Titan Krios instruments. From 2008 also held a professorship at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, followed by a position at TU Delft in the Netherlands in 2013. In 2020, he was among the founding members of CryoWrite, a company in Basel that he led as CEO until recently.

His contributions to science, to the tools of structural biology, and to our understanding of aquaporins, ion channels, and secretion systems are immense. In more than 400 publications, he shared deep expertise, bold and visionary thinking, and an exceptional attention to detail.

Yet with all his fascination for science, people were always more important to him than career or results. He was a kind group leader. He was motivating, a shining role model, yet gentle towards colleagues and the members of his lab. We postdocs were offered last authorship positions on publications when he found that we had made significant contributions to the direction of the project.

Andreas lived a rich and full life outside of the lab. He had a wonderful family, a wide circle of dear friends, played banjo in a jazz band, and was an outstanding skier and spirited hiker. He welcomed colleagues and friends with warmth and understanding. A large number of his former students still love science today and have been able to build fulfilling careers, in no small part thanks to Andreas and his generous support offered to us.

Andreas will be greatly missed.

[Andreas_Engel.jpg]



Henning Stahlberg
Laboratory of Biological Electron Microscopy
Institute of Physics, School of Basic Sciences, EPFL, and
Dep. of Fund. Microbiology, Faculty of Biology and Medicine, UNIL,
Cubotron, BSP421, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland
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