Prof. Slevogt is a new members of RESIST
Prof. Dr. Hortense Slevogt, a renowned expert in infectious diseases of the respiratory tract, joined the RESIST team in mid-November 2022: She is a new member and also serves on the RESIST Internal Advisory Board (IAB).
She studied medicine in Berlin and worked as a physician and scientist for 17 years in the Medical Clinic with a focus on infectiology and pneumology at the Charité in Berlin. In 2011, she moved to the University Hospital of Jena, where she led a research group, and since 2017 she has also worked in the Clinic for Internal Medicine I. Prof. Slevogt came to MHH in 2022, and she is a senior consultant in the Clinic for Pneumology and Infectiology. Her area of responsibility includes the diagnosis and therapy of people with infections of the respiratory tract, with infections in immunosuppression or with tropical medical infections.
At the HZI in Braunschweig, she heads the research group ” Dynamics of respiratory infections”. Her research laboratory is located there, which further strengthens translational research between the MHH and the HZI. She researches the importance of the lung microbiome for inflammation of the respiratory tract and analyses the role of commensals – microorganisms in the airways and lungs that do not cause infections – as a component of the lung microbiome. “I am interested in the importance of commensals in relation to susceptibility to respiratory infections and their influence on the pulmonary immune response and thus on the course of lung infections,” she says.
As part of RESIST, Prof. Slevogt is investigating the interactions between commensals and microbial pathogens and the influence of this interaction on the shaping of the immunological milieu in the airways and lungs. Among other things, she analyses the effects of the direct interaction of bacterial commensals of the lung microbiome of healthy individuals on the epithelium of the airways and she characterises these effects on infections of the airway epithelium with bacterial lung pathogens.