Virologist Florian Krammer returns to Vienna

Virologist Florian Krammer returns to Vienna

The Austrian virologist Florian Krammer In addition to his professorship at the Icahn School of Medicine in new York also in Vienna take up a part-time professorship, as he confirmed to APA.

From March he will be in Medical University of Vienna employee. Furthermore, the renowned researcher, who has become a prominent communicator in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, is launching a new institute for “science communication and pandemic preparedness”.

Krammer: “It is an interesting option to carry out research in Austria as well”

O Ludwig Boltzmann Institute will be unveiled at a press conference on Monday along with other new installations. Krammer is expected to start as head here in mid-2025. Before that, the scientist is working on creating a new research group and laboratory as “Professor of Infectious Diseases” at Meduni Vienna. “It's an interesting option to do research in Austria,” says Krammer: “But it's not like I'm leaving the US now.” Krammer will continue to work 80% of his time in New York; his involvement in Vienna is 20%.

He already has numerous research collaborations with partners from Vienna, Graz and Innsbruck, as well as Norway, Germany and the Netherlands. In terms of content, Krammer also wants to deal with pathogens that are relevant in this country, such as hantavirus or avian flu viruses, “which are also regularly detected in Austria”. He wanted to build another bridge between US research and the Austrian science community, said the researcher, who pointed to several international examples where transatlantic commitments work very well.

Krammer received research funding worth $132 million

Krammer was born on December 17, 1982 in Voitsberg in Styria and grew up in Pack. She attended the Federal High School in Köflach, Styria, and studied biotechnology at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (Boku) Vienna, where she graduated in 2010 and where she specialized in the field of applied virology. As a postdoc, Krammer worked for a virologist, also from Austria, in the Department of Microbiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital. Pedro Palestino at the.

Since then, he has focused, among other things, on developing a flu vaccine that should be effective against all strains of the flu virus and is already being tested in clinical trials. To this end, it received research funding worth $132 million (around €122 million) from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2019.

Since 2019, Krammer has also been a professor of vaccinology at Mount Sinai Hospital, where he directs the “Sinai-Emory Multi-Institutional Collaborative Influenza Vaccine Innovation Center” (SEM-CIVIC). The scientist, who has published more than 100 specialized articles and is involved in the publishing process of many specialized journals, has become known to a wider audience, especially through his involvement in social media during the corona pandemic.

As a scientific communicator, Krammer was already active before SARS-CoV-2, mainly on X (formerly Twitter). During the Corona period, his number of followers increased sharply, rising from around 2,000 followers. He is currently followed by over 340,000 people on X.

It was important for Krammer “not to preach water and drink wine”

Shortly after the new virus emerged in early 2020, Krammer and his team presented a test that could detect antibodies in the blood. Subsequently, the virologist published numerous highly acclaimed articles on SARS-CoV-2 research, as well as vaccine development and efficacy, in leading scientific journals. Together with Palese and colleagues, he also developed a particularly cheap Covid-19 vaccine (“NDV-HXP-S”), which is currently being tested, has already been approved in Thailand and is about to be approved in Mexico. In the US, Krammer also plays a leading role on a committee of experts that evaluates emerging variants of the pathogen.

Krammer once said that he always tried, even in his numerous media appearances, to “offer a lot of independent information” and describe the situation calmly, in a way that “my grandparents could understand.” It was also important for him “not to preach water and drink wine.” Therefore, he was quickly vaccinated as part of a study and spoke about it to calm people's fears.

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| February 25, 2024, 12:45 pm