Arnold von Eckardstein studied medicine at the Universities of Giessen and Kiel, Germany. He did his MD thesis at the Department of Human Genetics, University of Giessen. After a residency in internal medicine in Frankfurt, he worked from 1988 to 2001 at the University of Münster, namely as a Resident and then Attending Physician at the Institute of Laboratory Medicine and Clinical Chemistry and as a Junior and then Senior Investigator at the Institute of Arteriosclerosis Research. Since 2001, he has been Professor at the Medical Faculty of the University of Zurich and Director of the Institute of Clinical Chemistry of the University Hospital of Zurich.
Recently, he was Secretary of the European Atherosclerosis Society and President of the Swiss Atherosclerosis Society. Previously, he also served as Chairman of the European Lipoprotein Club, President of the German Atherosclerosis Society, and President of the Swiss Society of Clinical Chemistry. He is member of the Editorial Boards of European Heart Journal, Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Biology, Journal of Lipid Research, and Journal of Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine.
His main research interests include risk factors and biomarkers of cardiovascular diseases as well as structure, function, and metabolism of high density lipoproteins (HDL) and sphingolipids. Prof. von Eckardstein has published more than 300 original and review papers in international peer reviewed scientific journals as well as several textbook chapters on the biochemistry of lipids and lipoproteins, the pathophysiology and diagnostics of dyslipidemias, and various aspects of laboratory medicine.