Reinhard Schneider, former EMBL Team Leader, passed away on Monday 24 August 2026 at the age of 65.
It is with great sadness that we share the news of the passing of Reinhard Schneider. Reinhard was a Team Leader in the Structural and Computational Biology Unit at EMBL Heidelberg from 2004-2012. May he rest in peace.
“With great sadness, we are saying goodbye to Reinhard Schneider, Head of the Bioinformatics Core and Professor of Bioinformatics at the University of Luxembourg, who suddenly left us a few days ago.
Reinhard chaired the ARISE evaluation board from the very beginning of the program. He led the evaluation and decision meetings with great dedication to fairness, openness to talent, and constructive feedback. His wish to support and find the most talented young scientists and offer them a chance to propel their careers guided him and, through him, guided the Board and the whole program.
His legacy of going the extra mile to give a chance to the best talent will live on with the program and our Evaluation Board in the years to come.
Thank you, Reinhard, for your kindness, your curiosity, and your open heart for science and young fellows. The community of scientific research infrastructures and training will greatly miss you.
We extend our deepest condolences to his family, friends, and scientists whose lives and research he influenced.”
ARISE and ARISE2 Programme Teams, EMBL
“What made Reinhard stand out is that he brought a company executive style of leadership to the academic environment, something that was very welcome to get things done. When he moved to Luxembourg, I experienced him really shining with those skills and setting up a huge compute infrastructure there, and running an outstanding bioinformatics core facility.”
Lars Steinmetz, Associate Group Leader / Director of Life Science Alliance, EMBL Heidelberg
“Reinhard had close interactions with EMBL throughout his entire life. In a first phase during his diploma (1988-1989) and PhD thesis (1990-1994) with Chris Sander followed by a postdoc (1994-1997) still at EMBL. Following a couple years at LION bioscience, during his second phase at EMBL, when he was team leader in the SCB Unit from 2004-2012 (I joined myself as HoU in 2007). Finally, in his 3rd phase as an advisor in Arise and Elixier when he was in Luxembourg.
As a team leader at EMBL, Reinhard’s big theme was data integration and data visualization. One platform he developed was the BIO-Compendium for the analysis of large-scale systems biology data, the other one was the Arena3D visualization tool. One of his big successes was “Reflect” which was a plug-in to Firefox or other browsers that tags proteins and chemicals in websites, pdfs and Microsoft documents and links them with summaries of the protein and chemicals and connected data bases (similar as AI tools do this now-a-days). They won a prize, the Elsevier Grand Challenge award (worth 35 K), with Reflect.
I remember him as very professional, well-organized, always friendly but also very busy.”
Christoph Müller, Emeritus Scientist, EMBL Heidelberg
“What can I say about Reinhard? Reliable, friendly, calm, positive. Someone with whom I needed few words, or none at all, to agree on the essential things: what to do, and how. That kind of understanding is rare. It is the quiet language of people who trust each other completely.
Reinhard had an amazing capacity to draw a clear path through non-trivial organizational issues, in particular around EU matters, and most especially ELIXIR, where we worked together until almost yesterday. It still feels strange to write ‘until almost yesterday.’
But more than any of that, Reinhard is, for me, the memories of the time at EMBL, when the world was still to be discovered, we were inventing bioinformatics, and science was more an adventure than a business. I can still see him there. In the middle of a group of pushing postdocs. fiercely, but friendly, defending their research, Reinhard, who was still a predoctoral student (the most “senior” predoc I have ever met), stood out as the one who was building for the future, foreseeing the big picture of what bioinformatics was going to become: large-scale data, HPC and parallel computing, high-throughput biology. Topics that now seem obvious, but that were certainly not on the radar of many of us at the time.
I have lost a friend, and so have all of us. His loss closes an era. What I will miss most is the ease. At any meeting, he was the first person I would look for, for a coffee, for a dinner, knowing that nothing needed to be explained, that the conversation would be good, that I would leave it richer than I came to it. That is a rare gift. I am grateful to have had it, and I will miss it deeply.”
Alfonso Valencia, former EMBL Heidelberg postdoc, 1988-1994.
Condolences
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