Christian Haass, PhD
Dr. Haass graduated in Molecular Biology at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. He was a postdoc and assistant professor of Neurology at the Harvard Medical School in the institute of Dr. Dennis Selkoe. He was appointed as professor at the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim in 1995. Since 1999 he is the head of the division of Biochemistry at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University and since 2009 he is also the speaker of the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) in Munich. His primary research areas are the molecular mechanisms of neurodegeneration with a focus on Alzheimer’s and Frontotemporal Dementia. He initiated the DFG-Forschungsschwerpunkt (National Priority Program) “Cellular Mechanisms of Alzheimer’s Disease” and was speaker of the Collaborative Research Center (SFB 596) “Molecular Mechanisms of Neurodegeneration” from 2000 until 2012. Since 2012, he is speaker of the DFG Excellence Cluster “Systems Neurology” (SyNergy).
Dr. Haass was member of the senate of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and he is elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), the Lepoldina and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He has received a number of prestigious awards, among them the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz-Award of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the Potamkin Award of the American Academy of Neurology, the Sheik Hamdan Award for Medical Sciences, the ERC advanced grant, a Honorary Degree of the University of Zurich, the Order of Merrit on Ribbon from the Federal Republic of Germany and most recently the MetLife Foundation Award for Medical Research.