Editors

About the Editor

Kenneth Timmis studied microbiology and obtained his Ph.D. at Bristol University. He undertook postdoctoral training at the Ruhr-University Bochum, Yale and Stanford, at the latter two as a Fellow of the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation. He was then appointed Head of an independent research group at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin and subsequently Professor of Biochemistry in the University of Geneva, Faculty of Medicine. Thereafter, for almost 20 years, he was Director of the Division of Microbiology at the National Research Centre for Biotechnology (GBF)/now the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI), and concomitantly Professor of Microbiology in the Institute of Microbiology of the Technical University Braunschweig. He is currently Emeritus Professor in this institute.

The Editor-in-Chief has worked for more than 30 years in the area of environmental microbiology and biotechnology, has published over 400 papers in international journals, and is an ISI Highly Cited Microbiology-100 researcher. His group has worked for many years, inter alia, on the biodegradation of oil hydrocarbons, especially the genetics and regulation of toluene degradation, and on the ecology of hydrocarbon-degrading microbial communities, discovered the new group of marine oil-degrading hydrocarbonoclastic bacteria, initiated genome sequencing projects on bacteria that are paradigms of microbes that degrade organic compounds (Pseudomonas putida and Alcanivorax borkumensis), and pioneered the topic of experimental evolution of novel catabolic activities.

He is Fellow of the Royal Society, Member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation, Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, Member of the European Academy of Microbiology, and Recipient of the Erwin Schrödinger Prize. He is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the journals Environmental Microbiology, Environmental Microbiology Reports, and Microbial Biotechnology.