Prof. Jürg Gertsch
University of Bern, Switzerland

Prof. Jürg Gertsch studied cultural anthropology at the Universidad Central de Venezuela (UCV) and Neurosciences and Biochemistry at Sussex University (UK) and the Biozentrum Basel. He received his M.Sc. in Biochemistry (1997) and his PhD in pharmacognosy, ethnobotany and natural product chemistry from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich in 2002 under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Otto Sticher and Prof. Dr. Sir Ghillean Prance (Kew Gardens, London). Between 2003 and 2009 he was postdoc and then group leader at the Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences in the laboratory of Prof. Karl-Heinz Altmann at ETH Zurich. He has carried out fieldwork in Venezuela, Sarawak, Mexico and Bolivia. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Cagliari and University of Guadalajara. Since 2009 he is the professor of Biochemistry and Pharmaceutical Biology at the Medical Faculty of the University of Bern. Since 2014 he is deputy and co-director of the Institute of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine at the University of Bern. Dr. Gertsch’s research focuses on molecular pharmacology and analytics of the endocannabinoid system and drug discovery, Chagas disease, the cannabinoid pharmacology and translational research. His research group works on projects related to chemical biology, neuropharmacology and biochemical pharmacology of lipids, with a focus on translation. He has been coordinating different research grants related to the endocannabinoid system and medical cannabis. He is a co-founder of Synendos Therapeutics and Tasteomics.