Job Vacancy in “Nature Careers”

Medical specialists

• Fachärztin/Facharzt (m/w/d) für Mikrobiologie, Virologie und Infektionsepidemiologie

Postdocs and doctoral scientists

• Doctoral researcher/Ph.D. student, research group Prof. Dr. S. Suerbaum
• Postdoctoral Position at the Chair of Med. Microbiology, research group Prof. Suerbaum
• Research Assistant Molecular Medical Microbiology (MTLA, BTA, VMTA, B.Sc./M.Sc. Molecular or Medical Microbiology)
• Postdoc TV-L E13_AG Wendling (100%)
• Doctoral scientist/Ph.D. student_AG Wendling TV-L E13 (65%)
• Doctoral scientist/Ph.D. student_AG Wendling TV-L E13 (65%)

With his diverse and varied life’s work, Max von Pettenkofer is one of the most exciting minds in 19th century science. From a poor farmer’s son and short-lived dropout, he made it to the scientific elite and, as president of the Academy of Sciences, even to the highest-ranking representative of the research disciplines in the Kingdom of Bavaria. He achieved extraordinary things in many fields. However, Pettenkofer discovered his true mission with scientific hygiene, for which he conclusively built an entire edifice of thought. As a thought leader in health care, he created trends in public health. Pettenkofer turned his teaching and research institute into the world’s first center of excellence for hygiene, which attracted students from all over the world and became the international flagship of the University of Munich. Pettenkofer’s hygiene think tank became the hub of a global network.

Starting points: Chemistry and cholera

Although Max von Pettenkofer studied pharmacy and medicine in Munich from 1837, he never practiced medicine. He much preferred researching the processes in the human organism as a chemist even in his young life. With this choice, Pettenkofer demonstrated the right instinct for highly topical research and at the same time helped to make chemistry the key subject in contemporary medicine. The chemical branch of knowledge was trusted to finally shed light on the darkness that for centuries had hidden the inner life of the sick person from medical view and understanding. Already in the laboratory of Justus von Liebig in Giessen, where Pettenkofer trained, he displayed a high degree of independence in chemical thinking and discovered numerous detection methods for substances occurring in the human body and its juices. His appointment as professor of medicinal chemistry at the University of Munich in 1847 marked the first step on Pettenkofer’s career ladder, and in 1853 he was promoted to full professor of organic chemistry in the medical faculty. Throughout his life, Pettenkofer saw himself primarily as a medicinal chemist. This also applies to his work in the field of hygiene.

With his research on the origin and spread of cholera, Pettenkofer made a name for himself internationally as an epidemiologist in addition to his excellent reputation as a chemist. The epidemic, which originated in India, brought chaos and death to Europe in the 19th century. Even though Pettenkofer’s interpretation of cholera, the epidemic-relevant developmental step of which he placed in the soil, led him down a monstrously wrong path, the recommendations derived from it for warding off cholera proved to be extremely beneficial. The hydrological infrastructure recommended by Pettenkofer to purify the soil in cities – an efficient water supply with sufficient pressure in combination with a sufficient alluvial sewer system – were not only major technical projects, but also formed a new infrastructure for health. Max von Pettenkofer contributed significantly to people’s health happiness. In his cholera research, Max von Pettenkofer recognized, on the one hand, the elementary importance of prevention and, on the other, the fact that diseases and epidemics obviously have a lot to do with filth and unhygienic environmental and living conditions. This insight led him to take a closer look at the subject of hygiene. And as with the fight against cholera, he soon set new standards in this area as well.

Project Hygiene

Hygiene refers to the totality of all measures taken to protect and promote the health conditions of individuals and human society. When Pettenkofer began his efforts in this regard, the hygienic conditions were alarming. Especially in underprivileged residential areas, conditions were dire. Many people lived in one apartment, and sanitary facilities were rudimentary. Even if people were not yet afraid of bacteria – they had not yet been discovered – other pests were all the more numerous.

The fact that environmental factors and personal hygiene play a role in dealing with health risks had been thought of since ancient times. Pettenkofer drew on this ancient tradition of knowledge on the one hand and the contemporary sanitary reform ideas in France and England on the other, and placed himself at the forefront of this movement. As a genuine scientist, he was disturbed by the fact that – on closer examination – medical experts in the field of health care knew in principle little more than any lay person equipped with common sense. Pettenkofer drew a sharp line between himself and this rather intuitive “gut knowledge” and declared it his goal to capture hygiene with the language of modern science. He wanted to be able to say with certainty exactly what “fresh air” and “clean water” were in scientific precision and terminology, what constituted “good food” and what constituted “good clothing,” and when a home was truly “healthy.”

For Pettenkofer, deciphering the interactions between the human organism and its immediate environment formed the basic prerequisite for effective prevention of diseases and epidemics. Pettenkofer opened up the immediate space around the human organism, as it were, and gave people a new view of their world. This included topics such as soil, air and water quality, the influence of soil on the spread of diseases, the ventilation and heating of premises, the hygienic value of plants inside the home, personal hygiene, the function of clothing or cleanliness in the home and on the street.

Pettenkofer did not invent hygiene. But he ensured reliable knowledge production in the field of hygiene by consistently applying the experimental method. It was precisely for this achievement that Pettenkofer was awarded the golden Harben Medal in 1897 by the British Royal Institute for Public Health, at that time the world’s highest award in the field of hygiene. Pettenkofer endeavored to provide a secure scientific basis for measures that had previously been applied more intuitively or on an empirical basis. Thus, Max von Pettenkofer’s name is indeed associated with breakthroughs in modern hygiene and prevention as well as public health. In this sense, Pettenkofer is rightly considered the “father of modern hygienic science,” as the Reich Health Office once honorably dubbed him. To progress along his path, Pettenkofer combined medical expertise with the latest knowledge from physics, chemistry, technology, statistics and economics. All these different parameters together formed the basis of hygiene. With this “crossover thinking,” which is considered particularly progressive even from today’s perspective, he made hygiene the first interdisciplinary subject in medicine.

Hygiene as a subject and research field

Pettenkofer’s aim was to record the health-relevant relationships between the human organism and its environment without speculation and with scientific conciseness. He wanted to record all factors that contributed to a healthy life. With changing teams and collaborators, Pettenkofer set about researching these aspects and set standards worldwide.

The focus was on the three classical elements of air, water and earth. For Pettenkofer, keeping the air clean was an elementary task of health care and an urgent concern for residential hygiene. His studies on indoor climate also gave rise to the Pettenkofer number, which is still used today to assess indoor air quality. Pettenkofer’s measurements documented that the air in homes, schools, inns, and other locations was far from atmospheric air quality. In search of a simple measure for comparing the quality of indoor and outdoor air, Pettenkofer came up with carbonic acid, which was present in both indoor and outdoor air and could be easily measured using the method he developed. The carbon dioxide content served him as a measure of the volatile organic substances emitted by humans, which were actually responsible for a good or bad indoor climate. Pettenkofer determined that above a carbon dioxide concentration of one per mille, the air in an indoor space no longer met hygienic requirements. In connection with the quality of indoor air, ventilation and heating now became particularly important.

Since, in addition to air, water plays a central role in human life, Pettenkofer also turned his attention to water quality. Hygienically safe water remained a scarce commodity until the middle of the 19th century. Even though Pettenkofer underestimated the role of drinking water in the development of epidemics, he gave drinking water quality the highest priority and developed an exemplary quality control system for the precious water. Dirty water, like polluted air, poor food, unhealthy clothing, or individual excesses in life, could disrupt physiological processes in the human body, making individuals more susceptible to disease. With the testing program he developed, Pettenkofer made a major contribution to determining quality criteria for hygienically safe drinking water, which cities then used as a guide when setting up modern centralized water supplies. As early as the mid-1880s, microbiological tests were also part of the program to see whether water was contaminated with microorganisms.

For Pettenkofer, the development of a healthy environment also included the so-called assanitation of the soil. Since in Pettenkofer’s medical worldview the soil played a very special role in the spread of an epidemic such as the dreadful cholera, the assessment of the soil and its condition was a central point in addition to the above-mentioned cleaning of the soil. He developed a whole spectrum of factors that became relevant in urban planning and for the selection of building sites from an epidemiological point of view.

A healthy life included not only clean air and healthy living spaces, but also clean water and clean ground, proper clothing, personal hygiene and good food. Thus, Pettenkofer researched the physiological significance of our clothing and its interaction with the skin. He examined microscopically the substances used in clothing manufacture and analyzed the physical properties of textiles. At the top of his agenda was also personal hygiene. For Pettenkofer, bodily uncleanliness was the “most dangerous breeding ground for all diseases.” The new plentiful supply of running water improved bathing and showering facilities and facilitated regular washing with soap.

Hygiene as an academic discipline

The science of hygiene owes Pettenkofer not only a coherent body of thought, but also its academic anchoring in teaching. Pettenkofer ensured that thorough knowledge of hygiene and public health care became general medical knowledge. At his instigation, Bavaria was the first state to include hygiene in the compulsory curriculum in 1865 and established chairs for the subject, which were assigned to chemists entirely in accordance with Pettenkofer’s understanding. Pettenkofer himself received the newly established chair in Munich. Vienna and Leipzig followed in 1875 and 1878 as the next universities in the German-speaking world to establish chairs in hygiene. Amsterdam also established a professorship for hygiene as early as 1878. In 1882, all the states in the German Empire followed the path set by Bavaria and also made hygiene a compulsory subject.

After the subject of hygiene had been included in medical studies and even given a chair, a suitable teaching and research institution was still lacking. Initially, Pettenkofer had been given premises in the university building for a chemical laboratory. In 1855, he moved his “Laboratory for Physiological Chemistry” to the newly built Physiological Institute, where he remained until 1879. As the holder of a chair in hygiene, however, Pettenkofer converted his institution into a “Chemical Laboratory for Hygiene” as early as 1870. When Pettenkofer turned down an extremely tempting call to the University of Vienna in 1872, because it was associated with the promise of a new institute, the financial channels for a new institute building also opened in Bavaria. The ceremonial opening of the Hygiene Institute on April 19, 1879, impressively confirmed Max von Pettenkofer’s previous work. With two lecture halls and several laboratories as well as examination facilities, the new institute was excellently equipped for its tasks.

Think tank and competence center for hygiene

Pettenkofer subsequently developed the institute he had set up for systematic teaching and research in 1879 into a globally unique competence center for hygiene and environmental medicine. Pettenkofer’s think tank for hygiene became the ground station of his global hygiene mission. Soon the whole world was seeking advice and information from Pettenkofer on hygienic issues, and students made pilgrimages from far and wide to learn from Pettenkofer and from each other about “hygiene.” His teaching and research program met with great interest worldwide and allowed Munich to rise to become a global center of hygiene. Hygiene of the Pettenkofer brand became a Bavarian export to the whole world in the second half of the 19th century.

From Central, Southern, Eastern and Northern Europe, from England and Scotland, North and South America, from Russia and especially from faraway Japan, young doctors and researchers flocked to Max von Pettenkofer to learn hygiene from him. With his motivating personality, Pettenkofer captivated the young people. They took Pettenkofer’s knowledge back home with them and ensured a worldwide transfer of knowledge across national borders. A particular geographical focus in this respect was clearly Russia and Japan. In Moscow, Friedrich Huldreich Erismann (1842-1915), who came from Switzerland but was married to a Russian doctor and influenced by Pettenkofer, was appointed to the chair of hygiene at the University of Moscow in 1884, along with his own institute. As Erismann’s successor, Sergei Bubnov (1851-1909), another physician trained by Pettenkofer, took over the chair of hygiene in Moscow in 1896. Bubnow, who presided over the large International Hygiene Congress in Moscow in 1897, had worked with Pettenkofer in the early 1870s on sewerage issues and on housing, clothing and food hygiene. Among the young researchers who also made early pilgrimages to Pettenkofer from the Russian-speaking world were Aleksej Dobroslawin (1842-1889), Viktor Subbotin (1844-1898), Arkadij Jakobij (1837-1907) and Alexander Sudakow. Dobroslavin, who wrote a textbook on public health in 1882, subsequently received a chair of hygiene at the military academy in St. Petersburg, Subbotin became a full professor in Kiev, and Jakobij was responsible for teaching hygiene in Kharkov from the 1870s before moving to Kazan as a professor of hygiene in 1885. Sudakov taught hygiene in Tomsk from 1887, where he became a full professor in 1890.

In addition to the Russian Tsarist Empire, Japan sent a number of physicians to Pettenkofer. It was the time of the Meiji Reform, when Japan opened up to the West and adopted the best and most advanced from Europe. This included modern German medicine and, above all, hygiene. Numerous young doctors not only visited Pettenkofer, but also took courses with Robert Koch in Berlin. Among the well-known visiting physicians from Japan was the plague researcher Masanori Ogata (1854-1919), who returned to Tokyo in 1885 and was entrusted with the new teaching institution at the university along with the public health office. Pettenkofer’s ideas were spread in Japan mainly by the highest-ranking military physician Rintaro Mori (1862-1922), better known as Mori Ogai, or Jiro Tsuboi (1862-1903), who became the first dean of the medical school at Kyoto Imperial University in 1899; and finally Shimpei Gotoh (1857-1929), who, in addition to his merits in government service as a facilitator of modern hygiene, even made it to the position of Minister of the Interior and Foreign Affairs of the Japanese Empire and Mayor of Tokyo.

In other countries, too, and especially in German-speaking countries, Pettenkofer’s students made careers in the civil service or became university professors and held chairs in hygiene. In addition to the foreign representatives already mentioned, Gustav Wolffhügel (1845-1899), who became a full professor in Göttingen in 1877, and Karl Bernhard Lehmann (1858-1940), who initially went to Würzburg as an associate professor in 1887 and became a full professor in 1894 with the founding of the Institute of Hygiene, should be mentioned in this context without claiming to be complete. Josef Forster (1844-1910), as full professor, also took over the direction of the new Hygiene Institute in Amsterdam in 1878, before moving to the chair of the reform-oriented university in Strasbourg in 1896. Carl Flügge (1847-1923) became the first full professor of hygiene in Breslau in 1887 and director of the Institute of Hygiene in Berlin in 1909. Friedrich Renk (1850-1928), who played an important role in the Imperial Health Office, was appointed to the new chair of hygiene by the University of Halle in 1889, Josef von Fodor (1843-1901) became a full professor in Budapest, and Aladòr von Rozshegyi (Rospahegg) in Cluj-Napoca, which also belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg Empire at the time.

Role model and legacy

As it turns out, Pettenkofer’s Hygiene Institute served as a model at home and abroad. Pettenkofer was used as a model for the establishment of hygienic chairs, and Pettenkofer’s institution served as a model for numerous hygiene institutes. The Munich institute also provided the impetus for the founding (1917) of the now world-famous Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health in Baltimore. With his modern methodical awareness of hygiene, Pettenkofer inspired many physicians to follow his example and to create the basis for sound hygiene and well-founded prophylaxis through their own epidemiological and etiological studies.

After Pettenkofer was relieved of his teaching duties at the university at the end of 1893, he also resigned as director of the Institute of Hygiene in 1894. His immediate successors on the chair and as directors of the Hygiene Institute were his two students Hans Buchner (1850-1902) and, after Buchner’s early death, the Viennese professor Max von Gruber (1853-1927). Even under them, the Munich institute retained its worldwide appeal. However, research and work with bacteria now became more and more important in Munich as well.

What must not be forgotten, despite all the science, is Max von Pettenkofer’s attitude, which was deeply rooted in humanism and love of humanity. He stood in the tradition of the Enlightenment, whose principles he consistently defended: reason and science, progress and humanism. These are the core values of his impressive life’s work and his legacy.

Text (deutsch): Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Locher, Institute for Ethics, History and Theory of Medicine at LMU Munich

Staff list only available in German. Please click here. 

We congratulate Anna Weiss on receiving the VAAM PhD Award 2024 for her outstanding thesis, “Ecology of a Synthetic Gut Bacterial Community”.

Microbiome research has long struggled with poorly understood questions, particularly regarding the role of bacterial interaction networks in the intestinal ecosystem’s functionality. Anna tackled this using the Oligo-MM model, a synthetic bacterial community developed by the Stecher group for functional microbiome research.

In her thesis, Anna explored the metabolism and strain-strain interaction network of Oligo-MM, providing a valuable resource for the broader research community (Weiss et al., The ISME Journal 2021). Her dedication to science communication is evident in her original blog, “Exploring bacterial interactions – or how to become a bacteria whisperer,” making complex scientific concepts accessible. Anna also applied novel mechanistic insights from her in vitro methodology to analyze strain-strain interactions, earning her second authorship in a Cell, Host & Microbe publication (Eberl, Weiss et al., 2021) that highlighted the microbial context’s role in colonization resistance against Salmonella infection.

In her final doctoral year, Anna addressed a pivotal question in intestinal microbiome ecology: identifying key species within a diverse community that play crucial roles in its structure and functionality. Her experimental approach, analyzing “drop-out” communities, revealed surprising results about the influence of the metabolic environment on strain-strain interactions and keystone species. This groundbreaking study, published in Nature Communications with Anna as the first author (Weiss et al., 2023), has profound implications for the field and the interpretation of microbiome signatures.

Maybe you have asked yourself already, since bacteria “invented” almost all biochemical matters of life (except maybe RNA), why humans have epigenetics, for example for gene silencing, and not bacteria?

Indeed this is not true, since bacteria can have even more epigenetics than humans and also use epigenetics for different purposes, for example to keep bacterial viruses (bacteriophages) out of the cell, or also for the sake of fine-tuning gene regulation. However, many details about the epigenetic mechanisms and patterns  in bacteria are unknown.

The MvPI group of Prof. Josenhans in collaboration with Prof. Suerbaum and senior research fellow Dr. Ailloud, have gained more insight into how quantitative bacterial epigenetics can be, and how variable it can become under environmental changes. Together with the doctoral researcher Lubna Patel in our graduate program, they used the stomach bacterium Helicobacter pylori which modifies its genome extensively by methyl groups, and a particular sequencing method, to find out where the genome is exactly methylated and how much. They made epigenetic maps of the whole genome and could find that certain nucleotides and certain gene networks show more epigenetic influence and fine-tuning than others. Different functions in virulence and housekeeping genes are suspected. Prof. Josenhans and coworkers therefore would like to use the new knowledge in the future to find out more about the function of the differential quantitative methylation and also use this for novel applications, for instance in antibiotic resistance research. The study was supported by DZIF. You can find more information on the publication website: doi: 10.1186/s12915-024-01921-1.

New professor at the Max von Pettenkofer Institute – Carolin C. Wendling

On 01.04.2024, Prof. Dr. Carolin Wendling took up her position as University Professor (W2) at the Chair of Medical Microbiology and Hospital Hygiene at the Max von Pettenkofer Institute. Ms. Wendling and her research group are investigating how bacteria change genetically and how this influences their pathogenicity and antibiotic resistance.

In her research, Prof. Wendling combines concepts and methods from evolutionary biology, microbiology, molecular biology, evolutionary genomics and mathematical modeling. Her work is predominantly experimental and hypothesis-oriented. One focus of her research is the role of bacteriophages in bacterial evolution. Prof. Wendling explains: “Bacteriophages, i.e. viruses that infect bacteria, are incredibly exciting because they can exert very strong selection pressure on bacteria. This can, for example, lead to a drastic change in the virulence of a bacterium due to the presence of certain phages.”

At the Max von Pettenkofer Institute, Prof. Wendling will conduct both basic and applied research on phage therapy. The aim of the basic research is to better understand the ecological and evolutionary relationships between bacteriophages and bacteria, particularly in complex microbial communities such as the human intestinal microbiome. Her research in the field of phage therapy aims to develop alternative treatment methods for multi-resistant bacteria in the long term. Another focus of her research is the establishment of an in vivo infection model in order to reduce animal testing on mammals. To this end, the working group is developing an insect model that harbors a human-like intestinal microbiome. Prof. Wendling explains: “My aim is to develop a cost-effective alternative to reduce animal testing, but still remain as close to reality as possible.” Chair holder Prof. Sebastian Suerbaum: “My colleagues and I are very pleased that we have been able to attract Professor Wendling from Zurich to the Max von Pettenkofer Institute and LMU. Her research area fits perfectly into the existing research focus of our institute and there are excellent new opportunities for cooperation and synergies within the Max von Pettenkofer Institute, at the Munich site and beyond. We warmly welcome Carolin Wendling to the Pettenkofer Institute and wish her and her team a good start in Munich.”

About the person:
Carolin Wendling studied biology at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. In 2014, she completed her doctorate in evolutionary biology at Kiel University and the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research under the supervision of Dr. Mathias Wegner with the thesis “Ecology and evolution of invasive Pacific oysters in response to pathogen infection and rising temperatures”. As a postdoc, she initially worked at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research in Kiel, the University of York and the ETH in Zurich. From 2019 – 2024 she led an independent junior research group at ETH Zurich.

The carcinogenic bacterium Helicobacter pylori has accompanied humans for about 100,000 years. The bacterium’s genes reflect the history of this millennia-long association and also allow conclusions to be drawn about human migration movements (Falush, …, Achtman & Suerbaum, Science 2003). The LMU microbiologist Prof. Sebastian Suerbaum, in collaboration with an international consortium of scientists, including from the Institut Pasteur in Shanghai and the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, has now been able to show with the help of new analytical methods that the Helicobacter pylori bacteria resident in Europe today are the result of several migratory movements from Africa. The exchange between the genomes of bacteria formerly resident in Europe with bacteria that African immigrants brought with them in their stomachs has made important contributions to the evolution of H. pylori and made it possible to optimise the bacterial genomes by selection. In contrast, H. pylori genomes in Asia have significantly fewer traces of African H. pylori.

The results, published in the renowned journal Nature Communications, provide a fascinating insight into the role of human migration in the evolution of this important pathogen.

Original publication: Repeated out-of-Africa expansions of Helicobacter pylori driven by replacement of deleterious mutations. Harry Thorpe#, Elise Tourrette#, Koji Yahara#, …, Sebastian Suerbaum*, Kaisa Thorell*, Daniel Falush*.

# co-first authors; * co-last authors.

Nature Communications doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-34475-3

Link zur Originalpublikation (Open Access)

Address
Max von Pettenkofer Institute
for Hygiene and Medical Microbiology
of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich
Pettenkoferstr. 9a
80336 Munich

Internet: www.mvp.uni-muenchen.de

Chair of Medical Microbiology and Hospital Hygiene

Phone: +49 (0)89 2180 – 72855/72801
Fax: +49 (0)89 2180 – 72802
E-mail: suerbaum(at)mvp.lmu.de

Chair of Virology
Telephone: +49 (0)89 2180-72901
Fax: +49 (0)89 2180-72902
E-mail: keppler(at)mvp.lmu.de

Legal representatives

The Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München is a public corporation. It is legally represented by its president.

The Chair of Medical Microbiology and Hospital Hygiene is represented by its holder Prof. Dr. med. Sebastian Suerbaum, Director of the Max von Pettenkofer Institute.

The Chair of Virology is represented by its holder Prof. Dr. med. Oliver T. Keppler, Director of the Max von Pettenkofer Institute.

Competent supervisory authority

Bavarian State Ministry of Science and Art, 80327 Munich, Germany

Sales tax identification number according to § 27a Umsatzsteuergesetz:

DE 811205325

Disclaimer
Despite careful control of the contents, no liability is assumed for the contents to which reference is made by means of external links. The operators or authors of linked pages are solely responsible for their content.

Operator of the server
EDP department of the Max von Pettenkofer Institute (address as above) under the direction of Aldric Namias.

The technical support and creation of content is carried out by:

Administration
The EDP Department of the Max von Pettenkofer Institute

Contents on the pages of the Max von Pettenkofer Institute
commissioned authors, working group

Responsible for the content according to § 10 paragraph 3 MDStV:
Management of the Max von Pettenkofer Institute or the respective chair.

Programming and technical support: Science Relations

The Max von Pettenkofer Institute (MvPI) of LMU offers a new structured international PhD program (starting winter semester 2019/2020) called “Infection Research on Human Pathogens@MvPI” under the umbrella of MMRS (https://www.graduatecenter.uni-muenchen.de/promotionsprogramme/index.html). This PhD program combines the work on an individual PhD project (natural science or medical PhD thesis) in the field of infection research (with focus on microbiology/bacterial pathogens, microbiota research, virology and infectious immunology) with program-specific side events for in-depth and comprehensive thematic rounding in central and current topics of infection research as well as further practical courses and offers on transferable skills.

Information on new projects and currently offered positions in the program can be found on the MvPI website (https://www.mvp.uni-muenchen.de/stellenangebote). Further information about the institute, the main topics worked on there and the current working groups can also be found on our institute website or can be obtained from the secretariat responsible for the PhD program at MvPI (Ms. Birgit Lang, Tel: 089-2180 72801 or Ms. Constanze Hartmannsgruber, Tel: 089-2180 72805 Email: PhD.infection(at)mvp.lmu.de).

We are currently in the process of adding a time-bound formal application procedure. Until this is done, please contact the professors and group leaders directly if you are interested in a PhD for your unsolicited application and check our “Job Opportunities” page regularly. You can also send your complete unsolicited application with two references to our office at any time (email). Thank you for your interest.

The current PhD candidates of our Postgraduate Program 2025