This is a summary of the curriculum vitae (CV) of Prof. Thomas C. Mettenleiter, Ph.D., President of the Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut (Federal Research Institute for Animal Health), Insel Riems, Germany, and Associate Professor and Honorary Professor, respectively, of the University of Greifswald and University of Rostock, both in Germany. He will give a presentation at Fujita Health University.
Professor Mettenleiter has been President of the Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut (FLI) for more than 25 years. The FLI is a German federal research institute, with currently >800 employees, which focuses on farm animal health and welfare and on the protection of humans from zoonoses, i.e. infections which can be transmitted from animals to humans. The FLI does basic and applied research in different scientific fields. A large part of research at the FLI is dedicated to viruses, and Prof. Mettenleiter started his career as a researcher in virology. The headquarters of FLI are located on a small island in the Baltic Sea, Insel Riems, which is connected by a road to the mainland. The institute was founded in 1910 by Friedrich Loeffler (1852-1915), a famous virologist, and is the world’s oldest virological research facility. Also to date, worldwide, the FLI can be considered as one of the institutes with the largest and most modern capacities for studying viruses. As the President of this institute, Prof. Mettenleiter plays an important role in world virology research.
As an authority, Prof. Mettenleiter has been repeatedly asked for opinions and quotes by the popular German press and television, but also by journals like Science (Malakoff 2012, Kupferschmidt 2012, Kupferschmidt 2023), Nature (Mallapathy 2020), and Nature Ecology and Evolution (Gruber 2017). He is founding co-chair of the „One Health High Level Expert Panel” jointly initiated by WHO, OIE, FAO, and UNEP, which has a function in helping to protect the world from future zoonoses such as COVID-19. He published >500 articles, some of which in Science (Jansen et al. 1995, Fouchier et al. 2012, Fouchier et al. 2013) and Nature (Mettenleiter 2009, Caron et al. 2022, Corleis et al. 2023).
Prof. Mettenleiter studied biology from 1977 to 1982 and earned his doctoral degree in genetics in 1985 at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen for his research work on pseudorabies virus conducted at the Federal Research Centre for Virus Diseases of Animals (BFAV) in Tübingen. With a research fellowship granted by the German Research Foundation (DFG) he went for a research stay at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA, from 1986 to 1987. After returning to BFAV, he obtained his post-doctoral habilitation in virology at the University of Tübingen in 1990. From 1994 to 2019 he chaired the Institute of Molecular Virology and Cell Biology at the Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut, Federal Research Institute for Animal Health (FLI), Insel Riems. He has been leading the FLI as director since 1996, in 1997 he was appointed President of the FLI. His main field of research is animal virus infections. He is a member of several international committees and working groups, and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the Academy of Sciences in Hamburg, the Polish Academy of Sciences, and the Royal Belgian Academy of Medicine. He has been awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover and from the Justus-Liebig-University Gießen, an associate professorship from the University of Greifswald and an honorary professorship from the University of Rostock. He is also a recipient of the Robert von Ostertag Medal of the German Federal Chamber of Veterinarians.
Professor Mettenleiter was my first boss in 1993-1997. I finished the last part of my Master’s degree doing a half-year project in his group in Tübingen, in the South of Germany, and then I got the offer to move with him and other members of his group to Insel Riems, which is in the far North-East of Germany, for my Ph.D. studies. His group members definitely had to work hard, but he was also a kind and good boss, already shown by the fact that group members and others followed him all across Germany to Insel Riems. We also had fun, repeatedly going out for dinner as a group, and occasionally making daytrips. At the personal level, amongst others, I am very grateful that he and several other group members (thank you Barbara, thank you Axel!) came all the way to Holland for my Ph.D. thesis defense ceremony. I also enjoyed all of his lectures, as he is an excellent speaker, and I am sure that our audience at Fujita Health University will as well.
CURRICULUM VITAE
(a very short version)
PERSONAL Born in 1957 in Göppingen, Germany
EDUCATION
1997-1982 Master’s degree in Biology, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany
1983-1985 Researcher at the Federal Research Centre for Virus Diseases of Animals (BFAV), Tübingen, Germany
1985 Ph.D. , Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany
1990 Habilitation, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany
POSITIONS
1986 ‐ 1987 Postdoc, Department of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA
1987 ‐ 1993 Head, Laboratory, Institute for Vaccines, BFAV, Tübingen, Germany
1993 ‐ 2018 Head, Institute of Molecular Virology and Cell Biology (IMVZ), FLI, Greifswald ‐ Insel Riems, Germany
1997-present Associate Professor, University of Greifswald, Greifswald, Germany
1997-present President, Friedrich‐Loeffler‐Institut (FLI), Federal Research Institute for AnimalHealth, Greifswald ‐ Insel Riems, Germany
2019-present Honorary Professor for Virology in Livestock Farming, University of Rostock, Rostock, Germany
