Checking back: What is Prof. Dr. Kilian Schober doing these days?

Prof. Dr. Kilian Schober was recently honored with the Life Sciences Bridge Award and appointed to a Heisenberg professorship. In his research he devotes himself to the immunity of human T-cells toward developing effective therapies against infectious diseases, cancers and autoimmunity.
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Prof. Dr. Kilian Schober
(© Uwe Dettmar)

From 2007 to 2014 Kilian Schober studied Human Medicine at the Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg – combined with periods abroad at St. George’s Medical School, University of London, and at the Joslin Diabetes Center, Harvard Medical School.
Having passed the state examination in Germany, he worked at the Institute of Medical Microbiology, Immunology and Hygiene (MIH) at the Technical University of Munich and concluded his residency to become a medical microbiologist in 2019. At the same time he worked as research fellow in the workgroup led by Prof. Dr. Dirk Busch and obtained his postdoctoral professorial qualifications in 2022 with a thesis on the T-cell receptor.

In a capacity as head of a junior research group in the field of infection research funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), in 2021 he transferred to the Institute of Microbiology at University Hospital Erlangen, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. In 2024 he was accepted to the Heisenberg Programme conducted by DFG, the German Research Foundation, and received a Heisenberg professorship for T-cell immunology.

From 2021 to 2024 EKFS funded a research project headed by Kilian Schober within the scope of the funding line First and Second Applications. “The funding by Else Kröner-Fresenius-Stiftung supported us as self-reliant workgroup (www.schoberlab.de) in the initial phase and was therefore of fundamental importance to me,” the scientist explains. In the course of the project Kilian Schober and his team studied T-cell responses to vaccines in the human organism. Alongside evolving a better understanding of vaccinations per se, attention was also given to studying quintessential issues concerning human T-cell biology.

Over the course of his career to date Kilian Schober has received numerous awards and prizes, among them the Jürgen Wehland Award from the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (2020), the Postdoctoral Award for Immunology from the Robert Koch Foundation (2021), and lately the Life Sciences Bridge Award from the Aventis Foundation (2024). 

Kilian Schober enjoys spending time with his family within their day-to-day routine. In his “time off” he takes an interest in travel, sports and culture.