The University Hospital of Cologne, the Faculty of Medicine and the Center for Biochemistry mourn the loss of Prof. Dr. Angelika A. Noegel, long-time Director of the Institute of Biochemistry I, who passed away on 19.01.2025.

Prof. Dr. Angelika A. Noegel was born on 14.02.1952 in Bamberg. She studied biology in Würzburg on a scholarship from the German National Academic Foundation and obtained her doctorate in 1979 under Prof. Dr. Goebel at the University of Würzburg with the topic “Investigations into the function of hemolytic plasmids in Escherichia coli”. From 1979 to 1983, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Rockefeller University in New York. Subsequently she worked as a research associate and research group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, Department of Cell Biology, in Martinsried near Munich until 1997. In 1997, she was appointed as C4 Professor at the Institute of Biochemistry, Faculty of Medicine, University of Cologne. Prof. Dr. Noegel has been an EMBO member since 2000. She was also a reviewer for the ERC, EMBO, DFG and other research organizations and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Cell Science. For more than 30 years, she devoted the majority of her research to the unicellular amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum and published significant results in the cytoskeleton, signal transduction and genomics. In particular, her involvement in the multinational Dictyostelium genome project was essential for its successful implementation. During her time as Director at the Institute of Biochemistry, Prof. Dr. Noegel successfully expanded her research activities to include research into the composition and functions of the protein complexes that connect the cell nucleus to the cytoskeleton in mice and the genetic causes of microcephaly in humans.

We are very grateful to Prof. Dr. Angelika Noegel for her many years of prudent leadership of the Institute from 1997 to 2017, her commitment to teaching and her exemplary dedication to the Faculty. With her passing, we have lost a friendly, calm and warm-hearted colleague, an excellent mentor, a consistent supporter of women in research and an extremely dedicated and outstanding academic. We will miss her very much.