Stefanie Dimmeler elected new spokesperson of the DZHK

Prof. Stefanie Dimmeler will succeed Prof. Thomas Eschenhagen as spokesperson of the DZHK board starting in December 2020.

Prof. Stefanie Dimmeler will start as the new spokesperson of the Board of Directors at the German Center for Cardiovascular Research (DZHK). She takes office in December 2020. Dimmeler succeeds Prof. Thomas Eschenhagen, who will retire from the Board of Directors at the end of 2020 after nine years in office.

Stefanie Dimmeler currently holds a position as director of the Institute for Cardiovascular Regeneration at the Center for Molecular Medicine at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt and deputy spokesperson of the DZHK site Rhine-Main. During her upcoming three-year term of office, Dimmeler would like to focus on intensifying the cooperation between DZHK sites. "Cooperation is our strength. The current COVID 19 crisis makes this particularly evident. Various experts within the DZHK are working together on solutions while cooperating with other German Centres of Health Research. We must continue to build on this strength with a strong focus and open ourselves even more to national and international partnerships."

Prof. Steffen Massberg from University of Munich/Klinikum Großhadern, and Prof. Thomas Sommer from Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC), were both re-elected for a new term in office as deputy spokesperson of the Board of Directors.

Stefanie Dimmeler has been a university professor at the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main since 2001. In 2008, she took over as head of the Institute for Cardiovascular Regeneration (http://www.cardiovascular-regeneration.com/) at the Center for Molecular Medicine there. The biologist and biochemist works in the field of molecular cardiology. She researches cardiovascular diseases and develops new therapeutic approaches to improve cardiovascular regeneration after heart attacks. In 2005, she received the renowned Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation. From 2008 to 2012, she was a member of the German Ethics Council. Since 2017 she is a member of the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina - National Academy of Sciences.

Since its foundation in 2011, she has been involved in various functions and committees at the DZHK. She is a Principle Investigator and, as deputy spokesperson of the DZHK site RhineMain, member of the Research Coordinating Committee (RCC), which is responsible for the scientific strategy of the DZHK.