He is the founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine in Münster, Germany.
He received his PhD from the University of Tübingen in 1985 for his research conducted at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology.
In the same year he started as head of a research group at the Max-Planck Institute of Immunobiology in Freiburg and assumed in 1994 a professorship for Cell Biology at the medical school of the University of Münster.
[1] In the course of his postdoctoral work in the group of Gottfried Schatz at the Biocenter in Basel, Vestweber studied the biogenesis of mitochondria and found the first membrane component (today known as TOM 40) of the mitochondrial import machinery for the transport of proteins into this organelle.
[3][4] At present the group focuses in this context on mechanisms that control the barrier function of the vascular endothelium and the blood vessel wall.