Sarina Ravens and Jens Bosse received their certificates of professorship appointment on 30th April 2020 at the MHH Presidium. Since May, they have obtained the first professorships financed by the Cluster of Excellence RESIST.

Professor Dr. Sarina Ravens is now Professor of Systemic Human Immunology. She has already been involved in developing and leading the RESIST research projects B3 and B5. Together with her research group at the MHH Institute of Immunology, she dedicates herself during her professorship to B and T cells of the immune system and investigates how these white blood cells functionally adapt depending on environmental factors and age.

Sarina Ravens received her master’s degree in biomedicine at the MHH and graduated at the Université de Strasbourg in 2014. She has been pursuing her research at the Institute of Immunology at MHH since 2015. “Together with my team and in close cooperation with other RESIST working groups, I am analysing the diversity of antigen receptors and gene expression patterns of B and T cells in relevant patient cohorts such as the cohort with premature infants recruited by the MHH Department of Paediatric Pneumology, Allergology and Neonatology,” explains the 34-year-old. She uses special high-throughput sequencing technologies and bioinformatical methods. For example, she hopes to find out how intestinal bacteria and infections affect the fitness of immune cells in early childhood and how this might be associated with susceptibility to infections over the course of a lifetime. Her long-term goal is to gain a better understanding of the susceptibility of patients with weakened immune systems to infections so that better therapeutic approaches can be developed.

Jens Bosse now holds the junior professorship for Quantitative and Molecular Virology. It is the first MHH group at the Center for Structural Systems Biology (CSSB) in Hamburg, a joint venture of nine scientific partners from Northern Germany. Professor Bosse’s group is granted by the MHH Institute of Virology and is, in addition, supported by the Heinrich-Pette-Institute, Leibniz Institute for Experimental Virology (HPI).

Professor Bosse analyses how the assembly of individual virus particles in infected cells is coordinated in time and space and which viral and cellular factors play a role in this process. He is particularly interested in herpes viruses. For his research the 38-year-old and his team use and develop highly sensitive live cell microscopy systems. He has been cooperating with RESIST scientists for years.

Jens Bosse studied molecular and applied Biotechnology in Aachen and received his PhD at the Max von Pettenkofer-Institute for Hygiene and Medical Microbiology of the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München in 2011. He subsequently did his research at Princeton University, New Jersey, USA. Since 2016 he has been head of the “Quantitative Virology” group, which is located at the HPI in Hamburg and will soon move to the CSSB. “There, my team and I are able to combine particularly well the latest structural biology results with data on the dynamics of virus replication in living cells, and thus identifying weak points in the viral life cycle as basis for new antiviral agents,” he says.

Contact:
Professorin Dr. Sarina Ravens: Ravens.Sarina@mh-hannover.de
Professor Dr. Jens Bosse: Jens.Bosse@leibniz-hpi.de