Sites of the Helmholtz Centre
The Sites of the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research are distributed all over Germany. In addition to the main campus in Braunschweig, there are facilities in five other cities: Hamburg, Hanover, Saarbrücken, Würzburg and Greifswald.
Centre for Individualised Infection Medicine (CiiM)
The vision of the Centre for Individualised Infection Medicine (CiiM) is to individualise the management of infectious diseases. CiiM is a joint venture of the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) and the Hannover Medical School (MHH) and was founded as an initially virtual network in 2015. Research activities at the center aim to identify individual parameters that influence the progress of infection and to translate these findings into optimized and individualised care of patients with infectious diseases.
Find detailed information on the Centre for Individualised Infection Medicine at: https://www.ciim-hannover.de/en/
CiiM Directors
The two CiiM directors Yang Li and Markus Cornberg are responsible for the establishment of the CiiM and represent the CiiM in scientific matters. The focus lays on answering clinically relevant questions in the field of infectious medicine with the aim of a treatment tailored to the individual patient. The two directors of the CiiM ideally ensure that the clinic is more closely linked to research and data science.
Yang Li
Yang Li has headed the Department of Computational Biology for Individualised Medicine at the CiiM and the HZI since 2019 and was also appointed Director of the CiiM. The focus of her research is on understanding the molecular mechanisms of immune-related/infectious diseases through integration of multi-omics data.
Yang Li obtained her PhD in bioinformatics at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands) in 2010. She received the National Bioinformatics Young Investigator Award of 2011 in the Netherlands. In 2013, she received her first personal grant: an NWO-VENI grant from the Dutch Research Council, which is an innovative research program to supporting talented and outstanding young researchers in the Netherlands. Thereafter, Dr. Li became an independent researcher and started to build her own research team to further her interests in the complex genetics of human diseases using the multi-omics datasets. Later, she received other prestigious personal grants including a ZonMW-Offroad and a Hypatia grant. Besides that she is co-applicant on several large consortium grants. She has published ~70 scientific articles including publications in Cell, Nature Medicine, Nature Immunology and Cell Reports. She also served as reviewer for many journals such as Nature Ecology & Evolution, Bioinformatics, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (UK) and Genetics.
Markus Cornberg
Markus Cornberg is a university professor of infectious diseases with a focus on hepatology and deputy director of the Department of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Endocrinology at the Medical School. His clinical focus is the treatment of patients with infectious liver diseases. In 2019, he was also appointed Clinical Director of the HZI and Director of the Centre for Individualised Infection Medicine (CiiM).
Prof. Cornberg has been involved as a responsible physician in numerous clinical trials investigating new drugs for the treatment of viral infections of the liver. He was the first scientific secretary of the Competence Network Hepatitis (HepNet) in 2002. In February 2005, he took over the management of HepNet and, since 2007, the medical management of the German Liver Foundation. Since 2007 he has been involved in the preparation and revision of the German guidelines on viral hepatitis B, C and D. Since 2007, Prof. Cornberg has coordinated the preparation of the S3 guideline on the management of hepatitis B virus infection. In 2012, he was the German representative for the preparation of the European Hepatitis B Guideline. From 2017 to 2020, Prof. Cornberg was a member of the Governing Board of the European Association for the Study of the Liver (EASL). His basic science research focuses on the importance of cellular immune responses for disease progression and treatment response in patients with viral hepatitis. Prof. Cornberg has published more than 300 original scientific papers as well as review and book chapters.
