TWINCORE Symposium 2017

TWINCORE Symposium 2017

External speakers

Ass.-Prof. Dr. Ulf Beier Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, USA
Prof. Dr. Dirk Brockmann Robert Koch - Institute & Institute for Theoretical Biology, Humboldt University, Berlin
Prof. Dr. Jan Buer Institute of Medical Microbiology, Universitätsklinikum Essen
Prof. Dr. Teunis Geijtenbeek Department of Experimental Immunology, Academic Medical Center, University of Amsterdam
Prof. Dr. André Gessner Institute for Medical Microbiology and Hygiene, Universitätsklinikum Regensburg
Prof. Dr. Mathias Heikenwälder Division of Chronic Inflammation and Cancer, Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum, Heidelberg
Dr. Barbara Rehermann Immunology Section, Liver Diseases Branch, National Institutes of Health, USA
Prof. Dr. Hansjörg Schild Institute for Immunology, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
Dr. Till Strowig Microbial Immune Regulation, Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research, Braunschweig

Ass.-Prof. Ulf Beier

Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, USA

Ulf Beier graduated from medical school at the Christian-Albrechts University in Kiel, Germany, where he also completed a doctoral degree (Dr. med.) studying head and neck cancer biology. After emigrating to the United States in 2005, he completed a residency in Pediatrics at UIC, Chicago, IL, and a Pediatric Nephrology Fellowship at CHOP, Philadelphia, PA. He stayed at CHOP after the fellowship and became faculty at the University of Pennsylvania in 2012. Throughout his clinical training in nephrology, Ulf Beier became very interested in transplant immunology, and in particular the field of immunometabolism. His laboratory studies the role of lactate, pyruvate and other metabolites in regulating immune responses.

Professor Dirk Brockmann

Institute for Biology at Humboldt University of Berlin and the Robert Koch Institute, Berlin

Prof. Dirk Brockmann studied physics and mathematics at Duke University and the University of Göttingen where he received his degree in theoretical physics in 1995 and his PhD in 2003. After postdoctoral positions at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Göttingen he became Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics at Northwestern University in 2008. In 2013 he returned to Germany where he became Professor at the Institute for Biology at Humboldt University of Berlin. Brockmann worked on a variety of topics ranging from computational neuroscience, anomalous diffusion, Levy flights, human mobility, computational epidemiology, and complex networks.
Brockmann pioneered the scientific use of mass data collected in online games in a 2006 study in which he and his colleagues analyzed the geographic circulation of millions of dollar-bills registered at the online bill tracking website "Where's George?" This study lead to the discovery of universal scaling laws in human mobility, the forecast of spreading routes of the 2009 flu pandemic in the United States and effective geographic borders in the United States. Brockmann also pioneered the development of computational models and forecast systems for the global spread of epidemics based on global air-transportation. In a 2013 study Brockmann and his colleague Dirk Helbing showed that complex global contagion phenomena can be mapped onto simple propagating wave patterns using the theoretical concept of effective distance. This method was employed for import risk estimates during the Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa in 2014.
Brockmann's research has been featured in an episode of the American crime drama television series Numbers.

Professor Jan Buer

Institute of Medical Microbiology, University Hospital Essen

Jan Buer is currently Full Professor of Medicine and Dean of the Medical Faculty of the University of Duisburg Essen. He is also member of the executive board of the University Hospital Essen. The University Hospital Essen is the first and largest dedicated comprehensive cancer center to be established in Germany and thus has a strong tradition in oncology, transplantation medicine and immunology & infectious diseases.
His laboratory focuses on studying tolerance induction in animal models as well as in patients with autoimmune diseases, tumors and infectious diseases. His devotement to research has generated over 230 scientific papers in leading medical and scientific journals. Jan Buer also serves as a peer reviewer for major scientific journals, including Journal of Experimental Medicine, Blood, Gastroenterology, etc. In 2006, he won the Roche Applied Science innovation award “Imagining the Future” through intense competition. He has strong scientific collaborators at leading medical school throughout Europe, China and the US. Jan Buer is permanently reviewing national and international grants in this area (e.g. NIAID, Wellcome Trust, GenomeCanada).  He is very familiar with educational programs going on in the biomedical field (MD and PhD Programs) worldwide.

Professor Teunis Geijtenbeek

Department of Experimental Immunology, Academic Medical Center, University of Amsterdam

Teunis Geijtenbeek was born in 1969 in Scherpenzeel, the Netherlands, and graduated in Chemistry in 1992 at the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands. In 1996 he obtained his PhD in Chemistry at the same university. He performed his postdoctoral research in Immunology at the St Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, with Prof. Y. van Kooyk / Prof. C. Figdor, and at the New York University, USA, with Prof. D. Littman. During his postdoctoral research he became interested in host-pathogen interactions and in particular how HIV-1 subverts the function of dendritic cells. He became full professor in 2010 at the University of Amsterdam, Academic Medical Center and he is now the head of the department of Experimental Immunology at the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His group studies the function of pattern recognition receptor on human dendritic cells in viral infections and adaptive immunity to pathogens.

Professor André Gessner

Institute for Medical Microbiology and Hygiene, Universitätsklinikum Regensburg

Prof. Dr. Dr. André Gessner studied Medicine and Molecular Biology at the University of Hamburg. He received his MD in infection immunology and his PhD in molecular virology. After 5 years of basic research at the Heinrich-Pette –Institute in Hamburg he established his research group at the University of Erlangen where he also completed his training and examination as physician for medical microbiology and infectious disease epidemiologist. In 2001 he joined the laboratory of Prof. Locksley at the University of San Francisco (UCSF), USA. For many years he was the spokesman of the German study group of infection immunology. His scientific work is focussed on molecular infection immunology and infectious diseases. Prof. Gessner is certified antibiotic stewardship expert and reviewer for several international Journals and scientific societies, including the German research society (DFG) and the German Ministry of  Education and Science (BMBF). Between 2008 and 2010 he got four calls on university chairs for Medical Microbiology. Since 2010 he is professor and director of the Institute for Medical Microbiology and Hygiene at the University of Regensburg, where 150 employees are working on all aspects of infectious diseases. Recently, Prof. Gessner was elected research dean of the medical faculty in Regensburg.

Professor Mathias Heikenwälder

Division of Chronic Inflammation and Cancer, Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum, Heidelberg

Prof. Heikenwälder and his group investigate the molecular and cellular mechanisms that lead to chronic inflammation, tissue damage, cancer and metastasis. In tight collaboration with clinics he is working on new models and therapy approaches. Prof. Heikenwälder studied microbiology in Vienna. After a two-year-research trip at the Max-Delbrück-Zentrum for medicine in Berlin graduated 1999 with highest honors. He started his doctoral thesis at the institute of neuropathology in Zurich and successfully graduated 2004 on the field of prion diseases. After his habilitation at the medical faculty oft he Universitätsspital Zürich he received 2007 a Max-Cloëtta-Professorship and started his work as a group leader with the research focus on "inflammation and cancer". In the year 2010he became junior professor at the TUM as well as group leader at the institute for virology at the Helmholtz Zentrum in Munich. Since 2015 Prof. Heikenwälder is group leader in the division F180 „chronic inflammation and cancer" at the German Cancer Research Centre in Heidelberg.

Dr. Barbara Rehermann

Immunology Section, Liver Diseases Branch in the intramural research program of NIDDK, NIH

Dr. Barbara Rehermann is Chief of the Immunology Section, Liver Diseases Branch in the intramural research program of NIDDK, NIH in Bethesda, Maryland, USA. Dr. Rehermann’s research career started in Hannover, Germany, where she received an M.D. degree and the Venia legendi for Immunology from the Medizinische Hochschule Hannover. In addition to a clinical residency and fellowship in the Department of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Endocrinology at the same university, she pursued a research year at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, NY and postdoctoral research training at The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA . She directed her own laboratory as an independently funded investigator at tge Medizinische Hochschule Hannover before moving to the National Institutes of Health. Her research interests are the immunobiology and pathogenesis of viral infections, in particular those of the liver. She studies the role of innate and adaptive immune responses in viral clearance and disease pathogenesis using multidisciplinary approaches that include research with biomedical specimens from infected patients, animal models and in vitro models of virus-host cell interaction. Her work was honored with national and international awards such as the Pettenkofer Research Award,,  the Loeffler-Frosch Award of the German Society for Virology and the NIH Bench-to-Bedside and the NIH Director’s Innovation Awards. Dr. Rehermann has served as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Immunology and is currently Consulting Editor for the Journal of Clinical Investigation and on the editorial board of the journals Gastroenterology, Hepatology, Journal of Infectious Diseases and Journal of Hepatology. She is an ad hoc reviewer for the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Journal of Experimental Medicine, Nature Medicine, Science, Immunity and others and has served as an ad hoc reviewer on NIH study sections and on national and international research committees. Dr. Rehermann is a member of the ASCI, AAP, AASLD, AAI and ASM in the US, and the DGfI and DfV in Germany.  She has trained more than 45 postdoctoral fellows and students many of whom continued academic careers as physician scientists in the US, Germany, Italy, South Korea and Japan.

Professor Hansjörg Schild

Institute for Immunology, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz

2003 - present: Director, Institute for Immunology at the University Medical Center of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
2002: Appointment as Full Professor of Immunology at the University of Marburg (declined)
1996 - 2003: Group leader, Institute for Cell Biology, Dept. of Immunology, University of Tübingen, Germany
1993 - 1996: Group leader, German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany
1990 - 1993: Postdoc, Stanford University Medical School (Dr. Mark Davis), Stanford, USA
1990 - 1993: Postdoc, Max-Planck-Institute for Biology, Tübingen, Germany

Dr. Till Strowig

Young Investigator Group Microbial Immune Regulation, Helmholtz-Centre for Infection Research, Braunschweig

Till Strowig studied Medical Biotechnology at the “Technische Universität” Berlin. After his diploma thesis at The Rockefeller University in New York, he remained there for his Ph.D. thesis supported by a fellowship from the Boehringer Ingelheim Foundation. He continued his scientific training in the laboratory of Richard Flavell at Yale University supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Since June 2013 Till Strowig is heading the Young Investigator Group “Microbial Immune Regulation“ at the HZI.