Executive board 2023-2024 About us

Reinhold Förster has been Full Professor of Immunology and Head of the Institute of Immunology at the Hannover Medical School since 2001. Prof. Förster is an internationally renowned expert on chemokines. Using gene targeting in mice, he has published fundamental work on the function of chemokine receptors such as CXCR5, CCR9 and CCR7 as well as ACKR4. He identified molecular mechanisms that control the migration of immune cells to and their positioning in lymphoid organs and investigated the role of steady-state turnover of dendritic cells in the induction of peripheral tolerance. In addition, he and his colleagues used 2-photon in vivo microscopy to investigate cell-cell interactions in the priming of immune cells and the killing of cytotoxic T cells. This enabled them to gain fundamentally new insights into the processes that control the settlement of immune cells in the lymph nodes. More recently, he investigated immune responses after immunisation with COVID-19 vaccines and in COVID-19 patients. Reinhold Förster was a member of six DFG-funded collaborative research centres and is co-spokesperson of the RESIST (Resolving Infection Susceptibility) cluster of excellence at Hannover Medical School.

Hansjörg Schild studied Human Biology in Marburg and received his PhD in Human Biology in 1990 from the Philipps University Marburg and the Max-Planck Institute for Biology in Tübingen (Germany) working in the group of Hans-Georg Rammensee. After a 3-year postdoc with Mark Davis at Stanford University (USA) from 1990 – 1993 (supported by a fellowship from the German Research Council), he worked as a group leader at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg. In 1996 he moved to Tübingen and stayed as a group leader at the Institute for Cell Biology, Dept. of Immunology (Head Prof. Rammensee) until 2003. In 2003 he accepted the offer to head the Institute for Immunology at the University Medical Centre in Mainz as full professor. Hansjörg contributed significantly to the understanding of MHC class I antigen presentation pathways and antigen recognition by cytotoxic T cells. His work now focuses on the understanding of immune regulatory mechanisms and the development of antigen-specific immunotherapies. Hansjörg was the chairman of the Immunology Research Center in Mainz from 2008 until 2017, when he became the Vice-Dean for Research at the University Medical Centre. Since 2020, he also holds the position as Deputy Chief Scientific Officer. Since 2018 he is also the speaker of the Collaborative Research Center 1292 of the German Research Council (DFG) and a selected member of the board of Directors of the Helmholtz Institute for Translational Oncology in Mainz. Hansjörg has been a member of the DFG review board 204 (Microbiology, Virology, Immunology) and the German Society for Immunology, serves in several scientific advisory boards and is, since 2018, a member of the committee for research infrastructures of the German Council of Science and Humanities (Wissenschaftsrat). He also serves as a reviewer and member of selection panels of many international grant agencies, scientific award panels and major scientific journals. Hansjörg authors more than 200 publications in scientific journals, holds several international patents and has cofounded Immatics Inc. in 2000.

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.

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.