Pathogenomics

Jörg Hacker studied biology and performed his doctoral thesis at the Martin-Luther-University of Halle in 1979. He was appointed as Associate Professor in the year 1988 and as Full Professor and Chair for Molecular Biology of Infectious Diseases at the University of Würzburg in 1993. His research interests center on the analysis of pathogenic bacteria and their host organisms, and his laboratory described the first pathogenicity islands as early as the start of the nineties. Jörg Hacker is a member of numerous academies and scientific societies and holds positions on several research bodies. He has received many awards, and was made Honorary Doctor by the University of Umea, Sweden, in 2002 and by the University of Pecs, Hungary, in 2004. Ulrich Dobrindt graduated with a degree in biology from the University of Göttingen (1995) and a PhD in microbiology (1999) from the University of Würzburg. He received a PhD scholarship from the Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds, and went on to carry out research on gene regulation in uropathogenic E. coli before becoming group leader of the Pathogenic Enterobacteria group at the Institute for Molecular Biology of Infectious Diseases working on enterobacterial genome plasticity focusing on extraintestinal pathogenic E. coli.