Eberhard H. Buhl
Members of the Society for Neuroscience will be very sorry to learn of the death, on January 18, 2003, of Professor Eberhard H. Buhl, Professor of Neurobiology and Head of the School of Biomedical Sciences, at the University of Leeds, United Kingdom.
Born in Germany in 1959, Professor Buhl graduated in medicine from the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University in Frankfurt in 1984. In 1987, he was awarded the higher degree of Doctor of Medicine summa cum laude by the same University. Following appointments as Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Neuroanatomy at the Max-Planck-Institute for Brain Research (1984-87), and as Staff Scientist in the Institute’s Department of Neurophysiology (1987-88), Professor Buhl took up an appointment as Research Officer in the Vision, Touch and Hearing Research Centre at the University of Queensland, Australia. In June 1990, he became an MRC Scientist in the MRC Anatomical Neuropharmacology Unit at the University of Oxford and, in 1996, was appointed as tenured MRC Senior Scientist and Group Leader. Professor Buhl took up the Chair of Neurobiology in the School of Biomedical Sciences at Leeds in October 1999.
By the time of his arrival at Leeds, Professor Buhl had already achieved international renown as an experimental neuroscientist, devoted to advancing the understanding of brain function through his research interests in areas such as cortical networks, signalling processes in neuronal circuits and cortical network phenomena. During his time at Leeds, Professor Buhl’s research, in many instances carried out in collaboration with fellow neuroscientists at Leeds, including Drs. Zaineb Henderson, Anne King and Miles Whittington, and at other universities, continued to make very substantial and significant progress. The extremely high reputation enjoyed by Professor Buhl for his research was reflected in his numerous publications in leading international journals, including several seminal articles in Science and Nature, and the frequent invitations extended to him to give presentations and seminars in countries throughout the world. In 2001, Professor Buhl was made an Editor of the Journal of Physiology and, in the following year, was appointed to membership of the Neuroscience Board of the MRC.
Eberhard maintained collegial scientific relationships with researchers around the globe. These scientists, and particularly his closest friends and collaborators, will remember Eberhard’s virtues and gifts: his meticulous attention to detail, combined with vast erudition; his absolute scientific and personal honesty; his selfless dedication to the interests of those near to him; his self-deprecating humor. He was a unique scientist/scholar who will be sorely missed.
