Eckhard Jankowsky is Associate Professor of Biochemistry and Physics at the Case Western Reserve University, Ohio, USA. He received his MS in Chemistry and PhD in Chemistry and Biochemistry from the Dresden University of Technology in Germany. He then went to Columbia University, New York, as a post-doctoral research fellow in the Department of Biochemisty and Molecular Biophysics. Subsequent to that, he became a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Physics at Stanford University, California, before his appointment as Associate Professor of Biochemistry and Physics in the Department of Biochemistry and the Center for RNA Molecular Biology at Case Western Reserve University. His honours and awards include: the Curt Engelhorn Postdoctoral Fellowship (awarded by the German Cancer Research Center) in 1997, the Damon Runyon Scholar Award (Lallage Feazel Wall Scholar) in 2003 and the Burroughs Wellcome Investigator Award (Investigator in the Pathogenesis of Infectious Disease) in 2007. He is also the author of numerous book and journal articles.