Peer Bork

Peer Bork was a German bioinformatician whose career spanned the rise of computational biology from protein sequence analysis to the study of whole microbial communities. He served as Interim Director General of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory from March 2025 until his death, and earlier as Director of EMBL Heidelberg and Head of its Structural and Computational Biology Unit. He died on 16 January 2026 in Taiwan, of natural causes, while travelling to speak at an international microbiome conference. He was 62.

Born on 4 May 1963 in East Berlin, Bork showed early mathematical talent and attended the Heinrich-Hertz-Oberschule. After military service on the border between East and West Germany he studied biochemistry at Leipzig University, earning a PhD in 1990 under Jens Reich at the Central Institute for Molecular Biology of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR. He completed a habilitation in theoretical biophysics at Humboldt University of Berlin in 1995. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall he joined EMBL in Heidelberg in 1991 as a visiting scientist on an EMBO fellowship, and the laboratory became his scientific home for more than three decades.

Appointed a group leader in 1995, he headed EMBL's Structural and Computational Biology Unit from 2001 to 2021 and directed EMBL Heidelberg from 2020 to 2025 before becoming Interim Director General. His research moved from statistical analysis of protein sequences, through genome-scale work and participation in the Human Genome Project, to pioneering computational studies of the human microbiome, including the influential concept of gut enterotypes. He contributed to MetaHIT and Tara Oceans, helped build widely used bioinformatics tools and databases, and later led EMBL's Traversing European Coastlines programme. Editorships, EMBO and Leopoldina memberships, honorary doctorates from Utrecht and Copenhagen, the 2008 Nature mentoring award, the 2009 Royal Society and Academie des Sciences Microsoft Award, the 2021 Novozymes Prize and the ISCB Accomplishments by a Senior Scientist Award marked a career of both discovery and infrastructure.

He married the computational biologist Rebecca Wade in Canterbury in 1994. They had two sons, Udo and Robin. Colleagues remembered a generous mentor whose lab trained more than a generation of scientists. EMBL announced that he died of natural causes on 16 January 2026. He is survived by his wife, his sons, a granddaughter and his mother. His tools, data resources and the coastal sampling programme he championed continue in the community he helped to build.