Éric Westhof is a French biochemist. He is a member of the Academie des sciences, head of Education and Training (DEF), and a member of the Board of Directors of the "La Main à la pâte" Foundation. He is professor emeritus of structural biochemistry at the University of Strasbourg at the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology.
After obtaining a bachelor's degree in physical sciences from the University of Liège, he carried out research work at the Regensburg Universität (Germany) on a EURATOM grant with a view to obtaining a doctorate from the University of Liège in 1974. He then became a research associate (on a Fulbright-Hays fellowship) at the University of Wisconsin until 1977 in Professor M. Sundaralingam's laboratory. Thanks to an EMBO grant, he then established himself in 1981 at the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (IBMC-CRNS), affiliated with the Université Louis Pasteur (ULP-Strasbourg) in France. In 1984, he obtained a position as a research fellow (CR1) and has been a professor of structural biochemistry since 1988. From 2005 to 2016, he was director of the CNRS Research Unit "Architecture and Reactivity of RNA" at the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology (IBMC), where he was director from 2006 to 2016. From 2003 to 2007 he was chairman of the Research Commission of the Faculty of Life Sciences of Louis Pasteur University, where he was an elected member of the Scientific Council from 2002-2006. He was then elected vice president research and doctoral training (2007-2008). Together with Alain Beretz, he is involved in the merger of the three Strasbourg universities and becomes vice-president research and doctoral training at the University of Strasbourg between 2009 and 2012.
Eric Westhof is executive editor of RNA journal (CSHP), Nucleic Acids Research (OUP), and the Journal of Molecular Recognition (Wiley).