In memoriam: Irene Schulz 1941 - 2026

Irene Schulz passed away on Sunday 29th March 2026. She made fundamental contributions to the field of Calcium Signaling and, in collaboration with the late Sir Michael Berridge, showed directly that inositol-1,4,5 trisphosphate (IP₃) released Ca²⁺ from a non-mitochondrial intracellular store that she later identified as the endoplasmic reticulum (ER). The discovery of IP₃ as a Ca²⁺ releasing messenger was a momentous event in the field of signal transduction mechanisms and was foundational for the field of Ca²⁺ Signaling. Irene was born in Berlin on 25th January 1941 and graduated from the Marie-Curie High School in Berlin in February 1960. She undertook her medical studies at the Free University of Berlin and graduated in Medicine in 1966. She then went to the US, as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda. In 1967, she returned to Europe to become Group Leader at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biophysics in Frankfurt, under the directorship of Karl Ullrich. From 1976 - 1991 she was also an Associate Professor of Physiology at the JW Goethe University in Frankfurt. In 1991, Irene became a full Professor and Director of the 2nd Physiological Institute at the University of the Saarland, Homburg/Saar and was in charge of that Institute until her retirement in 2006.