Professor Jörg Stürzebecher
Professor Jörg Stürzebecher died very unexpectedly on June 18th, 2007 on holiday in the Alps due to a heart attack at the age of 67. His wife Uta, two daughters Maria and Anne and his son Lorenz survive him.
Jörg was born in October 1939 in Halle, Germany. After Abitur (high school), he studied radiochemistry and chemistry at the Technical University of Dresden and received a Diploma degree in 1964. Later he worked on the differentiation and characterization of neurohormonal factors of the nervous system from the cockroach Periplaneta Americana at the Zoological Institute of the Friedrich-Schiller-University in Jena and received a Ph.D. degree in 1969 under the supervision of Prof. M. Gersch.
In 1970 he joined the group of Professor F. Markwardt at the Institute of Pharmacology and Toxicology of the Medicinal Academy Erfurt where he started to work on synthetic protease inhibitors. In 1984 he finished his Habilitation on synthetic inhibitors of thrombin and other serine proteases of the clotting system under supervision of Professor G. Wagner at the Faculty of Science, University of Leipzig. He has been the leader of the research group “Biochemistry of Haemostasis” at the Centre of Vascular Biology and Medicine of the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena since 1994, from which he retired in December 2006.
Jörg Stürzebecher has been an outstanding expert in the area of inhibitor design, especially for trypsin-like serine proteases. With his specialist knowledge and ideas he gave support to many working groups throughout the world and was always willing to provide substances for new experiments. He was an extremely productive author and co-author of more than 150 publications, patent applications, book chapters and a book on synthetic thrombin inhibitors. For many young students he was an enthusiastic teacher and supervisor of numerous diploma and Ph.D. theses. He contributed to the Journal of Enzyme Inhibition and Medicinal Chemistry as a founding Regional Editor over many years and also worked as editor for other scientific journals.
Besides his profession he was interested in many other aspects of life. In his hometown Erfurt he was strongly engaged in politics and social welfare activities. He liked gardening and the beauty of nature. Due to his straightforward and open minded character he found many friends who loved him and will certainly miss him a lot. He was a great scientist and warm-hearted person.