6th February 2025

top-level research

Three alumni of the Life Sciences Bridge Award have now successfully taken the next steps in their careers.

No sooner had Kilian Schober received the “Life Sciences Bridge Award” in September 2024 than he was accepted into the Heisenberg Program of the German Research Foundation and awarded a Heisenberg Professorship for T-Cell Immunology.

The program, named after Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976), offers outstanding researchers who meet all the requirements for appointment to a permanent professorship the opportunity to devote themselves intensively to their research and further sharpen their scientific profile until their appointment. Kilian Schober researches the immunity of human T cells in order to develop effective therapies against infectious diseases, cancer and autoimmunity.

Johannes Karges, winner of the “Life Sciences Bridge Award 2023”: The Dr. Otto Röhm Memorial Foundation awarded him the prize for young university lecturers in German chemistry for the work of his medicinal inorganic chemistry group at Ruhr University Bochum. As part of his previous work, Johannes Karges and his team developed, among other things, cancer drugs that are injected as ineffective precursors. These accumulate specifically in tumors and metastases and only develop their effect there when they are activated by light or ultrasound, for example. This enables chemotherapy without the dreaded side effects of conventional drugs.

After receiving a professorship at the Technical University of Munich in 2023, Melanie Schirmer, winner of the “Life Sciences Bridge Award” 2022, has once again been included in the Clarivate list of Highly Cited Researchers in fall 2024!

Clarivate publishes an annual list of influential researchers at universities, research institutes and organizations around the world who have demonstrated a significant impact in their field of research. Analysts at the Institute for Scientific Information identified around 6,000 Highly Cited Researchers in 2024 from more than 1,200 institutions in 59 countries and regions. The rigorous evaluation and selection process is based on data from the “Web of Science Core Collection” citation index and qualitative analyses.

Congratulations!