Mathias Walter Hornef MD

Mathias Hornef studied medicine at the Karl-Eberhard-University Tübingen, the Medical School Lubeck, the Mt. Sinai Medical School, New York, USA, and the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois (CHUV) in Lausanne, Switzerland. He then worked as a research assistant and medical microbiologist at the Max von Pettenkofer Institute of the Ludwig-Maximilian-University Munich. During that time, he worked on the role of type 3 secretion systems and translocated effector molecules during the pathogenesis of infections with Yersinia enterocolitica and Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

In 2000 he became a postdoctoral fellow supported by a scholarship from the German Research Foundation and later a postdoctoral fellowship from the Karolinska Institute in the group of Staffan Normark at the Microbiology and Tumor Biology Center (MTC) at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. There he worked on enteric antimicrobial peptides and innate immune recognition by intestinal epithelial cells. 2002 he became an assistant professor with a scholarship from the Swedish Research Foundation.

In 2003, he joined the Institute of Medical Microbiology and Hygiene of the Albert-Ludwig-University Freiburg. There, he completed his specialization as a medical microbiologist and started his own research group. In 2007 he moved with his group as an associate professor for Molecular Microbiology to Hannover Medical School and in 2014 as full professor and head of the Institute of Medical Microbiology at the RWTH University Aachen. During the last years, he has worked with his group on the establishment of neonatal gastrointestinal infection models with bacterial, viral, and parasitic pathogens as well as the postnatal establishment of the enteric microbiota and the maturation of the mucosal adaptive immune system after birth.