Marcus Altfeld serves as the Director of the Institute for Immunology at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf and Director of the Research Department Virus Immunology at the Leibniz Institute for Experimental Virology in Hamburg. He studied Medicine at the University of Cologne and received his MD in 1998. During his postdoctoral period at the University of Bonn and Harvard Medical School (HMS), he investigated T cell responses against HIV-1. He joined faculty at HMS in 2001, and became Professor of Medicine in 2012. In 2013, he was recruited to Hamburg. His lab studies biological sex differences of innate immune responses in viral infections, and the mechanisms by which NK cells recognize virus-infected cells.

Hanna Lotter studied veterinary medicine at the University of Giessen and received her DVM in 1986. During her postdoctoral period at the University of Göttingen and the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg, she completed her training in medical microbiology and worked on the development of new vaccine strategies in tropical medical parasitology. As head of a laboratory group, she worked on host-parasite interaction and immunology of parasites since 2007. In 2018, she received an associate professorship at the University of Hamburg and since then she has been the head of the animal facility and head of a research group at BNITM. Her lab focuses on therapeutic targeting and biological sex differences of innate immune responses in parasitic diseases.

Bianca Schneider is head of the Research group Host determinant in lung infections at the Research Center Borstel. She received her Diploma degree from the University of Bonn in 2002. For her doctoral thesis she worked in the field of cellular microbiology with Prof. Albert Haas at the Institute for Cell Biology and obtained her Dr. rer. nat. degree from the University of Bonn in 2006. During her postdoctoral training at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin (2006-2007), the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK (2007-2011), and the Research Center Borstel (2011-2014) she gained extensive experience with the mouse model of tuberculosis and immunological assays for studying immune responses against the causative agent Mycobacterium tuberculosis. She established her own lab, initially as a Junior Group Leader, at the Research Center Borstel in 2014. The overall goal of her research is to understand how host-related factors regulate anti-tuberculosis defenses, focusing on two major aspects, which are likely to play a crucial role in the pathogenesis of TB: the biological sex and viral coinfections.

Marylyn Addo is Head of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf and leads the Department of Clinical immunology of Infectious Diseases at the Bernhard- Nocht-Institute for Tropical Medicine. She studied medicine at the Universities of Bonn, Strasbourg, and Lausanne, received her MD degree in 1996 and completed her doctoral thesis in 1998. After a Master’s Degree in “Applied Molecular Biology of Infectious Diseases” and a Diploma in Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (DTM & H) at the London School for Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 1999, she pursued postdoctoral research years with focus on HIV Immunology at the Massachusetts General Hospital. (MGH)/Harvard Medical School (HMS) in Boston, USA until 2013. As a clinician scientist she completed specialist training in internal medicine (2007) and infectious diseases (2010) at MGH/HMS. Since 2013 she has headed a translational research program on virus immunology and vaccine development for “Emerging Infections”. Her research interests include the development of novel vaccination strategies against emerging viruses. She has conducted several early phase vaccine trials (incl. Ebola, MERS and SARS-CoV-2) for which she received the DZIF Translational Infection Research Award (2018) and the Pettenkofer Award (2019).

Manuel Friese studied medicine at the Universities of Hamburg, Oxford and UCL and received his MD in 2001. He completed his neurology training at the Universities of Tübingen and Hamburg. After his postdoctoral training at the University of Oxford from 2004–2008, he started his lab as an DFG Emmy Noether research fellow at the University of Hamburg. Since 2013 he has been consultant neurologist and Professor of Neuroimmunology and since 2014 director of the Institute of Neuroimmunology and Multiple Sclerosis at the UKE. His lab focuses on inflammatory and neurodegenerative aspects of neuroimmunological and neuroinfectious diseases.

Christoph Schramm, MD, is working as hepatologist/gastroenterologist at the University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE). He is leading the YAEL Centre for Autoimmune Liver Diseases, UKE, one of the largest services of its kind in the world. He holds a professorship for rare diseases and is scientific lead of the Martin Zeitz-Centre for Rare Diseases, UKE. As clinician scientist he is conducting several studies on the diagnosis, treatment and pathogenesis of autoimmune liver diseases. He is current lead of a DFG-funded clinical research unit with a focus on the pathogenesis of primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC, CRU 306) and is lead of the research group „Liver tolerance and autoimmunity“, funded by the State of Hamburg (LFF-FV78).

Dorothee Schwinge is an expert in immunology and inflammatory liver diseases with focus on cholangiocytes and immune cell interactions. She has established several mouse models for acute and chronic cholangitis. During internships in the laboratory of Ye Oo at the University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK and the working group of Mario Strazzabosco at the Yale University, New Haven (CT), USA, she has gained expertise in the isolation of primary human cholangiocyte and 3D cholangiocyte organoids. She established mouse and human cholangiocyte organoid technology in the laboratory at her home institution (UKE, I. Department of Medicine, Hamburg, Germany).

Sonja Loges studied biochemistry and medicine at the University Hospital Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE) and received her PhD and MD degrees in 2004 and 2005. She performed her Post-Doctoral training at the Vlaams Institute for Biotechnology (VIB) in Leuven, Belgium under supervision of Prof. Peter Carmeliet. Subsequently Sonja became head of a research group focused on tumor-microenvironment interactions funded by the Max-Eder Program of the German Cancer Aid (DKH). 2014, she became a board-certified hematologist & oncologist and W3 full Heisenberg Professor funded by the DFG in 2016. As attending physician, Sonja was leading the Thoracic- and Precision Oncology programs at the UKE and received an ERC Starting Grant in 2018. 2020 she became Chair of the Department of Personalized Oncology and Director of the newly established DKFZ-Hector-Cancer Institute at the University Medical Center Mannheim in combination with a DKFZ Division Head position. Her lab focuses on discovering novel mechanisms of tumor-host interactions and translating them into innovative treatment approaches for cancer patients.

Petra Arck studied medicine at the University of Tübingen and received her doctoral degree in 1994. Following post-doctoral fellowships at the McMaster University and University of Toronto in Canada, she pursued her medical training at the University of Würzburg. She then established herself as a senior researcher and later faculty member at the Charité, University Medicine Berlin. She was awarded with a Canada Research Chair, along with a Professorship from McMaster University in 2007 and returned to Germany in 2010 to accept a position as a Full Professor for experimental Feto-Maternal Medicine at the Medical Faculty of the University of Hamburg. Her research focus of the last 2 decades lies on the effects of adverse prenatal conditions on maternal, fetal and children’s immunity.

Stefan Bonn is Director of the Institute of Medical Systems Biology and Full Professor at the University Hospital Hamburg-Eppendorf. In 2007, he received his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg and subsequently worked as a postdoc at the European Molecular biology laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg. Since 2012, he has led the Computational Systems Biology group at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) in Göttingen and was concurrently head of the Genomic Core at the DZNE. His research focuses on integrative data analysis and interpretation as well as on the development and application of deep-learning-based analysis methods at the molecular and cellular level.