Ari Helenius - Curiculum vitae#

Ari Helenius has been full Professor of Biochemistry at the ETH Zurich since 1 November 1997. He is currently the head of several interdisciplinary projects in the field of protein folding and virus-cell interaction.

Prof. Helenius was born on September 3,1944 in Oulu, Finland and studied biochemistry at the University of Helsinki. He received his doctorate under Professor Kai Simons and was awarded the Komppa Prize for the best dissertation on chemistry in Finland in 1973. After six years as staff scientist at the European Laboratory for Molecular Biology (EMBL) in Heidelberg, he was appointed Associate Professor and in 1983 Full Professor at the Department of Cell Biology at Yale University, New Haven, CT. From 1992 to 1997 he was chairman of this department.

His research centers on membrane biology, virology and protein chemistry. In his group Prof. Helenius is currently working on two questions:

• By which mechanism are viruses able to enter host cells and how do they reach the nucleus where they multiply?
• How are newly synthesized proteins folded within the organlles of the living cell, and how does the cellular quality control system work that decides whether proteins in the endoplasmic reticulum are correctly folded or not?

This work uses methods from biochemistry, cell and molecular biology.