People

Thomas Korn obtained his MD from Würzburg University Medical School, Germany, and received a postdoctoral training with Vijay Kuchroo at the Center of Neurologic Diseases, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA. He is a board-approved Neurologist and senior physician at the Klinikum rechts der Isar of the Technical University of Munich. He holds a professorship in experimental neuroimmunology at the Technical University of Munich, Germany. He studies the biology of pathogenic and regulatory T cells in the context of autoimmune inflammation in the central nervous system.

Lilian Aly studied medicine at the Universities of Hamburg and Zurich and started her residency in 2014 at the Department of Neurology and the Klinikum Rechts der Isar (Technical University Munich) focusing on neuroimmunology.

She completed her MD thesis at the Institute of Neuroimmunology and Multiple Sclerosis in Hamburg with the characterization of JC virus-specific CD4+ T cell epitopes in healthy individuals. During this time, she participated in the graduate School “Inflammation and Regeneration” and received scholarships by the German national academic foundation and the YAEL-foundation. Further devoting herself to human T cell immunology, she investigated FTY720 effects on regulatory T cells in healthy individuals and multiple sclerosis patients for six months in Howard Weiner’s laboratory at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA) after completing medical school.

Lilian Aly joined our group in 2015 as a clinician scientist. She is currently investigating the role of dendritic cells in germinal center responses and receptor expression patterns across distinct T cell subtypes.

Garima Garg graduated from Amity University (India) in 2008 with a Bachelor in Biotechnology and then completed her MSc in Immunology at King’s College London (UK) in 2009, working on IL2RA variations in Type I diabetes. She attained her PhD in Biomedicine from Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (Braunschweig) in 2014 where her research focused on molecular and cellular mechanisms leading to epigenetic modifications in CD4+ Foxp3+ regulatory T cells (Tregs).

Since 2015 she is working as a Postdoctoral Scientist in our group, where she aims to investigate the mechanisms and cytokine signaling pathways that induce effector Tregs during CNS autoimmunity.

Sylvia Heink studied biology at the University of Leipzig and the University of Campinas, Brazil. In 2000, she joined the Institute for Biochemistry at the Charité University Medical Center Berlin for her PhD studies and characterized the biogenesis / turnover dynamics of immunoproteasomes. In 2004, she started to work on T lymphocytes causing CNS autoimmunity as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Immunology in Jena.

Since 2010, she is a postdoc in our group and continues to analyze factors like the cytokines IL-6, IL-12 and IL-23 in modulating the differentiation / stability of encephalitogenic Th17 cells.

Michael Hiltensperger studied technical biology at Stuttgart University (Germany) from 2009 to 2015. He performed his Master’s Thesis at Yale School of Medicine (United States) on the role of the gut microbiota in lupus and antiphospholipid syndrome. Since September 2015, he is a PhD student in our group and is working on immune cell trafficking in the context of CNS autoimmunity.

Veronika Husterer received her vocational training at the BBZ Ingolstadt and worked for a few years in a microbiology lab. She joined our group in 2012. Besides genotyping and lab organization her main areas of expertise are mouse preparations, cell culture and various special methods in immunology and molecular biology.

Benjamin Knier studied medicine at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg and completed his MD thesis on the role of the plasminogen-plasmin-system in hypertensive renal and cardiac damage at the Department of Medicine 4 – Nephrology and Hypertension in 2011. In summer 2011, he started his residency at the Department of Neurology at the Klinikum rechts der Isar and joined the Institute of Experimental Neuroimmunology as a clinican scientist and postdoctoral researcher in spring 2012.

His research focuses on the visual system during autoimmune neuroinflammatory diseases. He is currently studying mechanisms which regulate optic nerve inflammation and tissue damage in an experimental model of multiple sclerosis. Dr. Knier furthermore focuses on neuro-ophthalmologic aspects of multiple sclerosis towards the question, how the retina can be used to monitor different disease activity patterns and to predict the further disease course in patients with multiple sclerosis. Beside this, he is responsible for retinal optical coherence tomography (OCT) diagnostics at the Department of Neurology and serves as lecturer of the neurological chair.

Gildas Lepennetier studied Ecology, Evolution and Biodiversity at the University of Poitiers (France) and Bioinformatics at the University of Nantes (France). From November 2012 to March 2017, he completed his PhD concerning the “Evolution of gene architecture in Eukaryotes” at the University of Münster (Germany). Since then he is working as a postdoctoral fellow in our department.

Gildas Lepennetier is involved in several of our projects, and takes care of the data processing and statistical analysis. He is additionally working with Dr. Kowarik for the characterization of human B-cell repertoires from deep-sequencing, and with Dr. Lehmann-Horn for mice B- and T-cell repertoires characterization. Link to Pubmed

Meike Mitsdörffer studied medicine at the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt University Greifswald, at the Albert-Ludwigs University Freiburg, at the Eberhard Karls University Tübingen, at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore (USA) and Stellenbosch University (South Africa).

In 2004 she completed her MD thesis characterizing the role of HLA-G in gliomas and inflammatory myopathies at the University of Tübingen. In the same year she started her residency in Neurology at the University hospital Tübingen. From 2007 to 2010 she took a break from clinics for a postdoctoral fellowship in Vijay Kuchroo’s Lab (Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA). At that time she started to focus on the role of B cells in the pathogenesis of CNS autoimmunity. Subsequently, she continued her residency in Neurology, initially in Zurich (Switzerland) and since 2011 at the Department of Neurology of the Technical University hospital in Munich.

She is now working as a clinician scientist and is particularly interested in the pathogenesis and treatment of Multiple sclerosis. To further understand the differential role of B cell in CNS autoimmunity she employs a spontaneous and B-cell dependent EAE model.

Andreas Muschaweckh studied Biochemistry (B.Sc.) and Molecular Biotechnology (M.Sc.) at the Technical University Munich (TUM). After graduating from TUM in 2008, he pursued his doctoral degree at the Institute of Virology (TUM/Helmholtz Center Munich) studying the mechanisms governing the local generation of tissue-resident memory CD8+ T cells after acute viral infection of the skin. Since 2013, he also worked in a collaborative project with the Department of Experimental Neuroimmunology investigating the role of α4-integrins in the CNS trafficking of protective T helper cells during viral encephalitis.

Since 2015, he works as a postdoctoral scientist in the Department of Experimental Neuroimmunology, where his research currently focuses on understanding the regulation of peripheral γδ T cells during homeostatic and inflammatory conditions. He is also interested in CNS-resident memory T cells and their contribution to CNS autoimmunity.

Christopher Sie studied Molecular Medicine at the University Medical Center Göttingen during which time he specialized in immunology by working on diabetic T cell metabolism with Holger Reichardt at the Institute for Molecular Immunology, on Melanoma immunosuppression with David Schrama at the University Hospital Würzburg, and on T cell migration in preclinical EAE with Alexander Flügel at the Institute for Multiple Sclerosis Research.

He received his Master’s degree in 2011 and joined our lab in 2012. His doctoral work was supported by a Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds PhD fellowship from 2013 to 2015. Current research interests include migration and development of Dendritic cells in CNS autoimmunity, in collaboration with the Krug Lab at LMU.

Anna-Lena Vogel studied biology at the Julius-Maximilians-University in Würzburg and received her master’s degree in immunology in 2013. In the same year she started her PhD at the Klinikum rechts der Isar der TU München and is currently a member of the TUM medical graduate center.

In our lab she is investigating B- and T-cell responses to Aquaporin-4 in mice to establish a novel animal model for the inflammatory autoimmune disease Neuromyelitis optica.