Staff

Prof. Wolfgang Wick, MD
Head of Division & Chairman, Department of Neurology, Heidelberg University Hospital

Silvana Caruso
Secretary

Tobias Kessler, MD
Tobias completed his medical training at the Heidelberg University Medical School and is a senior physician in the department of neurology (Heidelberg University Clinic). He joined the lab in 2016 as a postdoctoral fellow and defended his venia legendi in 2023. Tobias is particularly interested in identifying and overcoming drug-resistance mechanisms in glioblastoma and defining biomarkers for a more precise patient subgrouping from patient tissues and liquid biopsies. Wolfgang Wick and Tobias Kessler are both principal investigators of the UNITE work-package A03.

Robin Wagener, MD
Robin is a postdoctoral scientist and resident neurology at the UKHD. He studied the role of neurons during human brain development in the scope of his postdoctoral fellowships at the Center for Anatomy in Göttingen and Department of Basic Neuroscience in Geneva. He joined our group in 2018 as a Fellow of the Hertie Network of Excellence in Clinical Neuroscience. Robin is leading the B320’s efforts to unravel novel properties of glioblastoma stem-cells, combining sophisticated mouse models and multicolor microscopy readouts for correlation with molecular signatures. He´s especially interested in how these cells differ from other glioblastoma cells, tracking their fate and decipher overlaps with normal brain development.

Leon Kaulen, MD
Leon is a physician in the Dept. of Neurology at the Heidelberg University Hospital and joined our lab on a DKFZ clinician scientist fellowship in 2021. He completed his doctoral thesis in the Depts. of Neurosurgery and Genetics at Yale University, where he characterized mutations driving brain tumor formation. His current work in our lab focuses on the molecular hallmarks of primary CNS lymphoma with a particular interest in identifying novel targeted therapies for this rare entity. Alterations are hence modeled in vitro and and in vivo in xenograft mouse models employing multi-omics approaches.

Uwe Warnken, PhD
Uwe joined our lab in 2019 and is well-integrated into the Heidelberg Campus Protein Mass-spectrometry community due to his previous position at the Functional Protein Analysis Unit and Protein Analysis Core Facility. He has extensive expertise with sample preparation techniques for a wide range of applications and applies single-shot, TMT-quantitative and phospho-proteomics. Additionally, Uwe operates the ESI-Orbitrap and TIMS-TOF instruments and performs data analysis and interpretation.

Dieter Lemke, MD
Dieter is a senior physician and medical postdoc. He is a first-minute lab member and joined the lab when it was inaugurated in 2007. He´s elucidating the role of B7H3 in immune escape and invasion of glioblastoma. His efforts are also directed towards glioblastoma stem-cells.

Dirk Hoffmann, M.Sc.
Dirk is a PhD student who obtained his Master´s degree in Biochemistry at the Technical University of Munich. He applies omic methodologies such as single cell RNA sequencing to identify biomarkers for brain tumor networks and targeted therapies from glioblastoma patient samples and models. Additionally, he uses higher-throughput methodologies for target identification and validation and collaborates extensively with other UNITE glioblastoma work packages to investigate spatiotemporal traits of the identified biomarkers.

Ling Hai, M.Sc.
Ling obtained her master of bioinformatics and joined our group in 2021. She has a specific focus on the analysis and interpretation of bulk RNA, single cell RNA, proteomics and phospho-proteomics datasets.

Alexandros Kourtesakis, M.Sc.
Alex is a doctoral researcher who obtained his master´s degree in molecular medicine from Uppsala University and focused on replication stress during his Master thesis at the Karolinska Institute. In the scope of his PhD thesis, he´s working on CAR-T cells for glioblastoma therapy with a specific focus on recurrent glioblastoma and switch CAR-T cells.

Hannah Chow, M.Sc.
Hannah holds a Master degree in neuroscience from the University of Nottingham and is an integral lab member since 2020. Hannah is specifically interested in phenotypic and molecular characteristics of glioblastoma stem cells.

Jakob Ito
Jakob joined our laboratory during his first year of medical school. His work since then is focused on resistance of brain cancers to therapy including translational projects on treatment-induced growth arrest, marker identification and therapy improvement in recurrent glioblastoma.

Florian Iser
Florian´s MD thesis focuses on the establishment of a workflow for ctDNA-Sequencing from different CNS tumor entities and clinical application for less-invasive tumor diagnosis and potential treatment options.

Gina Cebulla
Gina is particularly interested in longitudinal monitoring of spinal muscle atrophy drug effects from cerebrospinal fluid and fingerprinting of glioma entities. Technique-wise, she applies a wide range of proteomic technologies.

Pascal Lehnert
Pascal is investigating acquired resistance against mTOR inhibition on transcriptome and proteome level with another subproject elucidating combinatorial drug combinations to overcome resistance.

Sofie Schaffranek
Sofie deciphers the molecular properties of glioblastoma stem cells by using sophisticated microscopy and artificial intelligence-based imaging analysis.

Petra Rübmann

Sonja Pusch

Denise Reibold

Dr. med. Dr. rer. nat. Rajiv Khajuria

Robert Chareza

Katharina Hartmann

Dr. rer. nat. Jonas Blaes

Dr. med. Dr. rer. nat. Elisa Hofmann

Ann-Katherin Steffen

Dr. Benedikt Wiestler

Dr. med. Markus Weiler

Dr. med. Christiane Grimm

Dr. med. Sarah Löw

Hans-Werner Pledl

Elena Czink

Frederik Bartels

Zhen Dong, MD

Dr. rer. nat. Philipp-Niclas Pfenning

Lorna Whyte, PhD

Sibylle Hodecker

Sebastian Luger

Anna-Luisa Thiepold