Ulrike Protzer
German Virologist
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ulrike Protzer is a German virologist who has been a professor at the Chair of Virology at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) since 2007. Her primary field of study is virus-host interactions of the hepatitis B virus and her work is focused on developing new therapeutic approaches for the treatment of chronic hepatitis B infection and related secondary diseases. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the novel virus SARS-CoV-2 has also been one of her research areas, and she has been a prominent voice in German media on this topic.
Ulrike Protzer | |
|---|---|
| Born | November 2, 1962 |
| Alma mater | University of Erlangen |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Virology |
| Institutions | Technical University of Munich |
Life and career
Protzer was born on 2 November 1962.[1] She studied medicine at the University of Erlangen from 1982 until 1988, where her thesis was on the topic of postoperative nausea,[2] before qualifying as a specialist in Internal medicine in 1996. After this, she did a postdoctoral fellowship at Heidelberg University, where she studied Hepatitis B infection[3] before becoming a group leader in the Institute of Virology there in 2000. In 2002, she become an Assistant Professor in Molecular Infectiology at the University of Cologne. In 2005, she qualified as a specialist in Medical Microbiology and Virology. At the end of 2007, as part of a dual appointment, she became director of the Institute for Virology at the Technical University of Munich and the Helmholtz Centre Munich, which she has headed ever since.[1] The work of her research group focuses on Hepatitis B virus[4]
Protzer is a member of numerous professional societies. She has been Deputy Chairwoman of the Board of Directors at the German Center for Infection Research (DZIF) since 2011.,[5] and is also on the board of the German Liver Foundation,[6] and of the University Hospital Cologne.[7] She has been a member of the organising committee of the International Meeting on Hepatitis B Viruses (HBV Meeting) since 2006 [8][1]
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, she and her working group have also been researching SARS-CoV-2[9] and she has been a prominent voice in the media as an expert in this field. She was also appointed to the Bavarian Council of Experts on the Corona Crisis[10]
Protzer is married and has two children.[1]
Honours and awards
Selected publications
- Specific and nonhepatotoxic degradation of nuclear hepatitis B virus cccDNA, Science (2014)[14]
- Living in the liver: hepatic infections, Nature Reviews Immunology (2012)[15]
- Metabolic Activation of Intrahepatic CD8+ T Cells and NKT Cells Causes Nonalcoholic Steatohepatitis and Liver Cancer via Cross-Talk with Hepatocytes, Cancer Cell (2014)[16]
- Hepatitis B virus X protein is essential to initiate and maintain virus replication after infection, Journal of Hepatology (2011)[17]
- Investigation of a COVID-19 outbreak in Germany resulting from a single travel-associated primary case: a case series, The Lancet Infectious Diseases (2020)[18]
- Multilevel proteomics reveals host perturbations by SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV, Nature (2021)