Dr. Erik T. Frank

Emmy Noether research group leader at the Univer­sity of Würzburg

Erik T. Frank is an Emmy Noether research group leader at the Univer­sity of Würzburg.

Erik T. Frank is an expert in behav­ioral ecology and evolu­tion. He researches how animals care for injuries – from ants that apply antimi­cro­bials to their wounds to combat infec­tions to chimpanzees that apply crushed flies on open wounds. To answer these questions, he employs behav­ioral exper­i­ments, micro­biome analy­ses, chemi­cal analy­ses, proteomic approaches, and theoret­i­cal modelling.

He is an advocate for science commu­ni­ca­tion and has acted as scien­tific adviser for landmark documen­taries like Life on Our Planet (Netflix), Sentient (National Geographic & Disney+) and Planet Insect (Curios­ity Stream). He has also written a popular science book about his research, which was short­listed for the “Science for All” prize in France in 2022. For his work, he was awarded the Röntgen Prize 2025 and the Baldwin and Inge Knauf Prize 2026 in Life Sciences and Medicine.