Prof. Dr. Edgar Wingender

Edgar Wingender studied chemistry at the Technical University of Braunschweig, where he received his doctorate in biochemistry in 1980 on the structure of the nucleosome.

During the subsequent postdoctoral period with Klaus Seifart at the Philipps University of Marburg, he worked on transcription factors of RNA polymerase III until 1986.

This was followed by research work on the subject of protein design at the Society for Biotechnological Research (GBF) mbH (today the Helmholtz Center for Infection Research ) in Braunschweig, where he initiated the Bioinformatics of Gene Regulation project in 1993 and headed the Bioinformatics working group until 2002.

During this time, among other things, the TRANSFAC database, which he had previously founded on a private initiative, became the subject and later an important basis for a number of publicly funded projects.

Since 2002, Wingender has been a professor of bioinformatics at the Georg-August University of Göttingen and, until his retirement in 2018, director of the Institute for Bioinformatics at the University Medical Center Göttingen (UMG).

In 1997, Wingender founded BIOBASE GmbH to distribute and maintain the TRANSFAC database.

From 2001 to 2010 he led the company as one of two managing directors (President & CSO).

In 2010, he founded the company geneXplain GmbH together with Alexander Kel in Wolfenbüttel, which he led as CEO until 2022 and has been advising since then.