Kilian Schober, MD, is a medical microbiologist and Heisenberg Professor for T cell immunology at the Institute of Microbiology, University Hospital of Erlangen, Germany. He is also a member of the Young Academy of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. Kilian studied Medicine at the Universities of Würzburg and London. After his MD thesis in the lab of Stephan Kissler at Harvard Medical School, Kilian trained to become a medical specialist for Microbiology, Virology and Epidemiology of Infections and joined the team of Dirk Busch at the Technical University of Munich as a post-doctoral fellow. As of 2021, he has been a group leader at the Institute of Microbiology in Erlangen. His lab focuses on the understanding & engineering of human antigen-specific T cell immunity. In particular, previous and current projects aim at revealing how T cells are driven in their fate through the expression of individual T cell receptors. For his work, Dr. Schober has been awarded the Jürgen Wehland Award of the Helmholtz Center for Infection Research, the Robert Koch Foundation Postdoc Prize for Immunology, the GlaxoSmithKline Science Award of Clinical Research and the Life Science Bridge Award of the Aventis Foundation. In 2024, Kilian was accepted into the prestigious Heisenberg program of the German Research Foundation.