Biography
Veit Hornung graduated from the University of Munich (Germany) in 2003, received his doctorate in medicine in 2004 and conducted his postdoctoral training at the University of Munich and the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester (USA). From 2008 to 2015 he was faculty at the University of Bonn (Germany) and in 2015 he was recruited to become the chair of Immunobiochemistry at the Gene Center of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. Dr. Hornung’s research focuses on the mechanisms of non-self recognition by the innate immune system and its functional consequences in microbial infection as well as sterile inflammation. His group was involved in the identification and characterization of several receptor molecules, their ligands, and their downstream signaling cascades, most importantly in the field of nucleic acid recognition (e.g. TLR7, TLR8, RIG-I, AIM2 and cGAS-STING). More recently, his group has focused its efforts on the dissection of innate signaling pathways in human immune cells using genome engineering technologies.
Since 2014 Veit Hornung has been listed as a Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher in the field of immunology and in 2015 he was elected to become an EMBO member. His current research is funded by the European Research Council and the German Research Foundation.