Executive board 2019-2020 About us

Thomas Kamradt studied medicine in Cologne, Vienna and Berlin. He began his clinical career as an assistant physician at the University Hospital Bonn, Internal Medicine (focus on infectiology and clinical immunology). From there Thomas moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, USA, to do postdoctoral research on T-cell tolerance. In 1991 he became Assistant Professor of Medicine at Tufts University Medical School Division of Rheumatology/Clinical Immunology where he worked on autoimmunity and infection. He returned to Germany in 1994 to head the AG T Cell Immunology at the German Rheumatism Research Center/Charité Berlin. Scientific topics were T-cell differentiation and effector functions, chronic inflammation and autoimmunity. At the same time, Thomas trained here as a physician for internal medicine and then worked at the Charité, Clinic for Internal Medicine,Division Rheumatology/Clinical Immunology. Since 2004 Thomas has been head of the Institute of Immunology at the University Hospital Jena. His research continues to focus on inflammation and autoimmunity.
Thomas was a member of the DGfI advisory board from 2013 to 2016 and became vice-president of the board in 2017. He is also involved in the organisation of the DGfI Autumn School and the DGfI Translational School and in the Commission on Animal Experiments. Since 2016 he represents DGfI as a member of the Review Board 204 (Immunology) of the DFG.

Christine S. Falk, Dr. rer.nat., is full professor for Transplant Immunology and director of the Institute of Transplant Immunology at Hannover Medical School (MHH) since 2011. In her research, she focusses on mechanisms of ischemia/reperfusion injury and its consequences for innate and adaptive immunity, especially tissue-resident T and NK cells in the context of solid organ transplantation, primarily lung, heart and kidney transplantation. Christine Falk graduated with her PhD from the Institute of Immunology at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, Germany, in the field of tumor immunology and continued her work on T and NK cell recognition of solid tumors as postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Molecular Immunology, Helmholtz Centre for Environment and Health (HMGU) in Munich. In 2004, she received her Venia Legendi at LMU for Human Immunology with a strong focus on the influence of the tumor microenvironment on anti-tumor immunity. From 2006 to 2010, she worked at the German Cancer Research Centre (DKFZ) in Heidelberg, Germany, as group leader of the Research Group “Immune Monitoring” with a strong interest in the improvement of cancer immunotherapy by understanding the mechanisms involved in treatment resistance.
Christine Falk has a long-term research interest in transplant and tumor immunology and the interface to infectious diseases in solid organ transplantation. Major aspects of her research are tissue-resident lymphocytes and the identification of “common denominators” of tumor vs. organ rejection and protection from infection. She published more than 110 peer articles in international peer-reviewed journals and received the Walter Schulz award for Tumor Immunology. At MHH, she is trust lecturer of the DFG, member of dissertation and research committees. Since 2014, she serves as board member of the German Cancer Aid Foundation (Dt. Krebshilfe), member for the Erwin-Schrödinger Prize of the “Science Award of the German Stifterverband”, and editorial board member of several journals and since 2019 as member of the Hochschulrat of the Leibniz University, Hannover.

Michael Lohoff studied human medicine in Würzburg where he received his doctorate in the Schimpl/Wecker group on the production of a hybrid monoclonal antibody. He trained as a medical microbiologist at the Institute of Clinical Microbiology at the University of Erlangen. Since then he has been interested in clinical infectiology, the differentiation of T-helper cells and the special role of IRF transcription factors in this process. As a consequence, he founded the T cell working group within DGfI 20 years ago and was its chairman for 17 years. After his habilitation and a research stay in the laboratory of Prof. Dr. Tak Mak in Toronto, he moved to the Institute for Medical Microbiology and Hospital Hygiene in Marburg as C3 Professor. He accepted a call to the professorship at the same institute, of which he is director to this day. Together with Andreas Radbruch, he formed the team that built the first school of our Academy for Immunology, the Spring School in Ettal. Since then he has been a member of the organising committee.

Carsten Watzl studied biology in Heidelberg. During his doctorate at the German Cancer Research Centre in Heidelberg in Peter Krammer’s department, he worked on the signal transduction of the CD95 (APO-1/Fas) receptor. As a postdoctoral fellow, he went to the USA to investigate the function of natural killer cells in Eric Long’s group at the NIH (National Institutes of Health). He then returned to Germany as junior research group leader at the Institute of Immunology at the University of Heidelberg, where he continued his research on natural killer cells and habilitated at the Medical Faculty of the University of Heidelberg. In 2008, he founded the NK Cell Working Group within the DGfI and was the spokesperson of the Working Group until 2015. In 2011, he was appointed to the Leibniz Institute for Work Research at the TU Dortmund (IfADo), where he heads the Department of Immunology as scientific director. He is a member of the Review Board ‘Immunology’ of the DFG.