Hartmut Wekerle

Hartmut Wekerle is a German medical scientist and neurobiologist. He is an emeritus director at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology and was the head of the department of Neuroimmunology until 2012.

Biography

Hartmut Wekerle was born in Waldshut in 1944. He studied medicine at the University of Freiburg. In 1967, he began scientific research at the Max Planck Institute for Immunobiology in Freiburg as a PhD student under Herbert Fischer. He finished his doctorate in 1971. After graduation, he worked at the Weizmann Institute of Science from 1971 to 1973 as a postdoctorate researcher. Later on, he led the Research Group for Multiple Sclerosis at the Institute of Clinical Neurobiology at the University Hospital of the University of Würzburg. In 1988, he was appointed director at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology. After receiving the Emeritus status at the institute in 2012, he continued his research for another five years as a Senior Professorship funded by the Hertie Foundation.

Hartmut Wekerle's work has been devoted to the study of cellular immune responses and mechanisms in the course of multiple sclerosis and other inflammatory diseases in the nervous system.
In particular, his research contributed to the following discoveries:

Detection of autoreactive T cell clones in the healthy immune system and their activation in autoimmune encephalomyelitis
Immunocompetence of central nervous glial cells
Regulatory CD8 T cells in experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis
Regulation of CNS immune reactivity by active neurons
Migration pathways of autoimmune T cells to the central nervous system
Activation of CNS autoimmune T cells by intestinal microbiota
Activation of CNS autoimmune T cells by MS derived microbiota