Prof. Dr. med. Christian Bogdan

Professor of Microbiology and Infection Immunology

Christian Bogdan is an immunologist and board-certified physician for clinical microbiology and infectious disease epidemiology. He studied medicine at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) in Erlangen, Germany, where he graduated in 1987 following a one-year clinical training at the University College and Middlesex Hospital Medical School and the Hammersmith Hospital in London, UK. Between 1988 and 1992, he was postdoctoral researcher first at FAU and the Center for Molecular Biology at the University of Heidelberg and then at Cornell University Medical College in New York, U.S.A. In 1993, he became research group leader at the Institute of Clinical Microbiology and Immunology at FAU, where he completed his habilitation in 1995 and was appointed as associate professor in 1997.

In 2003, he became full professor and head of the Department of Medical Microbiology at the University of Freiburg, Germany. Since 2007, he has been professor of medical microbiology and infectious disease immunology at FAU and director of the Institute of Clinical Microbiology, Immunology and Hygiene at the University Hospital Erlangen. In 2011, Christian Bogdan was elected to the National Academy of Science Leopoldina. From 2011 until March 2024 he was member of the German Standing Committee on Vaccination (STIKO) at the Robert Koch-Institute, Berlin. He has also served as president of the European Macrophage and Dendritic Cell Society from 2001 to 2005 and of the Paul-Ehrlich-Society for Anti-infective Therapy from 2020 to 2022. Since 2011, he has been spokesman of the Medical Immunology Campus Erlangen, which has recently been transformed into the FAU Profile Center for Immunomedicine. He is also speaker of the research consortium RTG 2740 “ImmunoMicroTope” that started in 2022 and is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

Prof. Bogdan´s research has been devoted to the analysis of the immune response to intracellular pathogens. His own lab investigates the function and regulation of the innate immune systems in the context of infections with Leishmania parasites and aims to define the factors that account for the clinical manifestation as well as the course of disease after infection. A particular focus has been the role of natural killer and innate lymphoid cells and the contribution of type 2 nitric oxide synthase and arginase 1 to parasite control and persistence, respectively. He and his coworkers also carry out research on vaccine immune responses, pursue studies on novel treatment options for cutaneous leishmaniasis and on innovative diagnostic procedures, and provide the microbiological diagnostic service for bacterial, fungal and parasitic infections at the University Hospital Erlangen, including the entire diagnostic spectrum for cutaneous, mucosal and visceral leishmaniasis. The research work, which has been supported by the DFG, the German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) and by the European Union, has led to over 250 publications.