Speaker

Leif Erik Sander is a physician scientist and a Professor of Medicine and Infectious Diseases at Charité University Hospital and a group leader at the Berlin Institute of Health (BIH), in Berlin, Germany. He studied medicine and completed his MD PhD at the Hannover Medical School, and completed his clinical training in internal medicine, respiratory medicine and infectious diseases at the University Hospital Aachen and at Charité University Hospital in Berlin. Leif did his postdoctoral training at the immunology institute at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, NY, before starting his independent lab at Charité in Berlin in 2012. His research is focused on host responses to vaccination and infection, with a particular focus on early innate immune responses and their impact on downstream adaptive immunity, and the design of new vaccines He received several awards, including an Emmy Noether Fellowship of the German Research Foundation and the Theodor Frerichs Award of the German Society of Internal Medicine in 2012 for his work on innate immune recognition of microbial viability. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he initiated several multicenter studies investigating host responses to SARS-CoV-2 infection and vaccination. He leads a Germany wide network investigating immunity to SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses and he is a member of the Expert Panel of the federal government of Germany on COVID-19. In 2022, he was promoted to full professor and took over as Chair of Infectious Diseases at Charité.

« Go Back