Gerd Jürgens (also spelt Juergens) (born 1949) is a plant developmental biologist and emeritus Director of the Cell Biology Department at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology[1][2] and Head of the Center for Plant Molecular Biology (ZMBP) at the Eberhard-Karls Universität Tübingen.
[3] During his postdoctoral years in the 1980s he worked with Nobel Prize winners Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard and Eric Wieschaus at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg on the topic of Drosophila melanogaster embryogenesis.
He was responsible for pioneering research in the genetic dissection of plant embryogenesis.
Using the genetically-tractable plant Arabidopsis thaliana he conducted the first forward genetic screen (using mutagenesis with 0.3% ethyl methane sulfonate (EMS)) looking for embryonic defects.
[5] Jürgens won the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize (the highest research award in Germany) in 1995.